The talk really is gong to be about the idea of freedom, and when I was listening to John talking about the process of facilitating the assemblies which is really what constitutes Occupy’s practices to some extent reminds me most days of my favourite quote from the radicalism of the 1960s which is: “Freedom is an endless meeting”, it’s the title of a book that came out in 2002 but I don’t think the author coined the phrase, I might have misremembered it, I think it comes from somebody from Students for Democratic Society or one of those groups from the 60s. Freedom is an endless meeting, what do we mean by this? Well, I’m not going to say what we mean by this now but my intuition is that it’s true and profound in some way. But it’s important to understand the not just for what occupy is but the whole tradition of radical activism that leads back to the 60s is. And it’s important to understand the contrast between this idea of freedom and the other ideas of freedom which are prevalent in capitalist society. I think it’s worth thinking about the conflict between, or that has taken place between occupy and St. Pauls which is like a physical expression of this idea of the endless meeting, I mean that’s what Occupy is to some extent, and its critics, people wanted to move it, Boris Johnson, who is always clinging to an idea of freedom when he is saying why occupy should be moved. It’s the freedom of individual citizens to go about their business, this is what freedom means in the liberal tradition, which is really the dominant political tradition in the West and now globally. What freedom means is the freedom to go about your private business, unencumbered by relationships with others, not having to having to do meetings or relationships or communities... What freedom means is essentially is the ability to make money and spend it, to do your business and go shopping. This is exactly the kind of freedom Boris Johnson posited Occupy as inhibiting by its brand. So there are two different kinds of freedom here, and that’s one of the things I want to think about.
Now in the process of doing that I’ve already started to touch on this question of what is Occupy, what kind of a thing is it? This is something that has come up, and already in Nick’s talk it comes up a lot of the time. Most answers to the question of what kind of kind of thing is Occupy, what is it, are limited to be frank. They are about what it isn’t. It’s not a homogenous entity, it’s not a coherent project, a political agenda, it’s not a set of demands and it’s not a political party et cetera. Occupy is not the first entity about whom that could be said and it’s the most immediate and anticipated in that respect in the social forums, The World Social Forum, the things that were XX was both criticised and praised by different people, for exactly this refusal to become a formal political identity, a project, an agenda. We are told Occupy doesn’t represent. It doesn’t represent a class, it doesn’t represent a nation, it doesn’t represent a people. The problem is I think it’s not enough. At some point you can’t only say it’s not this it’s not that it’s not this it’s not that. And very often the question of well what it is then, and this isn’t just true of Occupy its true to a whole range of projects which Occupy can be related, when that question comes up it becomes unavoidable. There is a real tendency for people, who should know better, to collapse back into an essentially liberal conception and say in effect it’s just an aggregation of liberals, that’s all that it is. The most important example I can think of from the past year or so of that kid of thinking, is at the height of the kind of public success of UK Uncut, a direct action, well it wasn’t direct, it was a protest camp, I’m very fussy about direct action as I grew up in 80s anarchism, and we still using the term direct action to me, pertinently occupying the space or real sabotage you didn’t have to protest – so UK Uncut protest group protested explicitly about the interrelationship between cuts and public services and the refusal of rich institutions and individuals to pay taxes. The evening after the big demonstration on the day of the big national trade union demonstrations, 26 March last year, the black bloc smashed up some windows, which is what they do, and one of the spokespeople of UK uncut who is a very intelligent person, who I’ve met once or twice, who is well spoken and a very articulate, impressive individual, was pressed by an interviewer on this question of UK Uncut as a peaceful nonviolent group and what they think about black bloc’s activities. And of course everyone knows what she thinks. She’s sympathetic to black bloc you know, they’re mostly sixteen, they want to get something out, but obviously it doesn’t really help anything – in terms of the campaign - smashing up Top Shop. But she won’t say this, she can’t say this. And she’s pushed into a corner, because UK Uncut has a position, which Occupy does now, that they don’t really have a position, that they are not an organisation... And I think her exact words were, it’s just up to individuals to decide how they want to behave. Now, this is a nonsense statement from the point of any kind of politics. You can’t predicate a politics on the idea that it’s just up to every individual to do what they want. For the start, if that’s the case, then why should we agree to pay taxes? How can you call upon Philip Green to pay their taxes, then say, on the level of our organisation there is no shared responsibility, there is no collective intentionality, that we are just an aggregation of individuals. I’m not saying this to have a go at this person. I’m just saying to show how persistent that idea is. How persistent this demonstrably and obviously problematic formulation, which is to say instead of being a political party, a homogenous meta-subject, our collective is just an aggregate of individuals, and how problematic that is. This is something that has come up for years and years, it used to come up on Reclaim the Streets…you know, there were some problems, I thought, with Andrew’s formulations at the start of this session, that nobody can speak for Occupy, you can’t speak for occupy I cant speak for Occupy, no one can speak for occupy. Well, again for any kind of way it just leaves you with again the assumption that all you have is an aggregate of individuals. It is not an adequate formulation of what we want from Occupy if we are to say no one can speak for Occupy all you. For me it would be more accurate to say that everyone could speak for Occupy, everyone can speak as occupy, as part of occupy... that would just be a suggestion that I would just throw out, but again this notion that ultimately there can be no form of representation and nobody can give voice to a shared set of views or positions, it always risks falling back into this individualistic conception that all we are is an aggregate of individuals, and I think this is extremely problematic and it’s important to get away from this in some way.
Obviously Occupy is a collective, it’s a collective something, as Nick says it’s a collective which emerges from a process of politicising social relations which I think is a good way of thinking about it. But the impression remains about what kind of something it is, you now, what is it that emerges? And how can something like this think, feel, make decisions, act in a way that is unique to it and which is more than just an aggregation of individual preferences. Because, by the way, if people really want just an aggregation of individual preferences, then you don’t need a collective like Occupy, there is a perfect mechanism for aggregating individual preferences and it’s called the market. In fact, this is exactly neo-liberalism’s own basic proposition about the nature of human social relations that human social relations function best when they are [based on] aggregating individual preferences and the aggregation of individuals. And if that’s what you think and you just want to be in a world where every individual can behave exactly how they want then why engage in radical politics because that is exactly the world that neo-liberalism is trying to create for us. So we have a set of problems here.
So why are Deleuze and Guattari important her? Because Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary, their philosophical project, is motivated as much as anything, by the search for ways of naming, thinking and acting which don’t depend on the legacy of liberal individualism or its authoritarian conservative shadows…you could read through, certainly, the whole of Capitalism and Schizophrenia - the two volumes, their core work - and see it as a series of attempts upon ways of naming, thinking, agency, the ability to act in the world and to be in the world in a way that is not limited by the assumption of liberal individualism, which just assumes that what acts in the world is just an individual, or a kind o meta-individual, I will explain that idea of the meta-individual in a moment.
Certainly, for example, if you take the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia the key concepts which they introduce at the start of either of them are motivated by this kind of thinking. The very first key concept they introduce at the beginning of Anti-Oedipus is the desiring machine. Notoriously difficult concept, I think so difficult to work with and so unclear that they themselves dropped it, they dropped it pretty much by the end of the first book and certainly by the second book. But why did they produce this notion of the machine as this somehow a liberating or progressive idea? Well, for them it was because a machine, or the way they used the term at that time, is arguably a name for anything that makes something happen in the world something that channels energies, that transmutes one kind of energy to another, something that is made from an [aggregation] of different kinds of connection sand they wanted to think about the multifariousness of relations, relations between people, people and objects, objects and objects, animals and ideas, can make things happen in the world in a way that is not limited by the assumptions of the liberal individual that is ultimately going into the individual subject as a source of agency, as a source of power. In the beginning of the second book the discussions of the rhizome is motivated by the same things…I mean, why does the rhizome become an important idea for Deleuze and Guattari? Because the rhizome is a form of organisation between elements, it might be elements in a political project, a corporation, indeed, it might be elements in a biological root system, but it’s one which is characterized by a set of qualities which the liberal tradition doesn’t tend to think of as characterising an effective form of organisation, and I’ll explain why in a moment. And finally this key idea, arguably the key term in A Thousand Plateaus, mentioned in the second book, and gets translated – in the good translations - as ‘assemblage’. In France, it’s agencement, which is a less technical-sounding term than assemblage, it means arrangement, it comes from agencer, partly means to arrange, like arrange flowers or organise things, and also means to pack in some sense.
To some extent Occupy is all these things in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, it’s a desiring machine, it’s a rhizome, it’s an assemblage, it’s an assembly. You know the resonance of these terms isn’t really an accident. Whether this tells us anything really specific about it is an open question because it’s true and it’s worth acknowledging that one of the issues with Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary is that they provide a very good philosophical vocabulary for talking about everything, talking about the world via metaphysics and it’s not clear whether, ultimately, they are telling you something’s happening with a political agency about the object that they are discussing and I think they do, and its important to keep in mind that Occupy might be a desiring machine, but then so is the table, or at least me sitting at the table is a desiring machine, just like it’s an assemblage, just like it’s sort of rhizome to the extent that there isn’t an obvious centre. And I think this might be an answer to Simon’s question about semantics and rhizomatics. Deleuze and Guattari are very careful, especially by the end of Capitalism and Schizophrenia; to not to be saying that rhizome’s are good. They are saying that we inhabit a philosophical tradition, we can find it difficult to think about rhizomes, and again I will explain why in just a moment, and I think it’s particularly important for us to think about them, but ultimately all relations have a rhizomatic connection and an organizing rhizomatic connection, and you can’t just say that rhizomes are good and you know one of the most famous lines of the book, don’t think that if everything was smooth space it would be enough to save us. So the question is then what is it then, what is good and bad with Deleuze and Guattari? I’ll come back to that or I’ll give you somebody else’ very clever answer to that question shortly.
In recent theory another term which has been used to try and designate some of the same properties of the social to all these terms of use […] the multitude of Hardt and Negri, again is a form of collectivity, which doesn’t suppress the identity of its component parts but is nonetheless active as a collectivity and is not simply an aggregation of individuals and the idea of multitude in that sense is inspired partly by Deleuze and Guattari and a sort of Delezo-Guattaro-critique of the history western thinking on some of these subjects, because as I said in the liberal tradition it is impossible to think of the collectivity as anything other than an aggregation of individuals.
So I am going a little bit about this historical idea which I think is important for understanding this current situation and understanding the neoliberal context in particular. What you see here is the frontispiece of a book called Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, it was published in 1651 and is often cited as the first significant text of political philosophy in the West. I mean you could go back to the Greeks, but certainly in the modern period. You can see that the Leviathan is a sort of giant figure and what it is made up of, its component parts, are all these individual figures. It’s described as a giant man made up of lots of men. Leviathan expresses the Hobbsian idea that what defines the collective, is that it is essentially always an aggregation of individuals whose connection between other members of the collective is completely dependent on their relationship to this one giant figure; the sovereign, the symbol of authority. Hobbes makes an argument for all kinds of thing and he’s an interesting figure because he is sort of the fountainhead of both the liberal tradition and the kind of authoritarian tradition. But Hobbes is famously the first person who posits what he calls the state at nature, there is no abstract state, it doesn’t really exist and historically, in the kind of unconditioned state, human beings are competitive individuals; they are not naturally cooperative or spontaneously communitarian. If they don’t find some way of defending themselves from each other the natural relationship between people is one of fear and risk. Individuals pose a risk to each other before anything else and so the idea is the reason we enter into any kind of society or collectivity is essentially to defend ourselves from the risk of violence posed by others. So what we do is we concede our individual sovereignty to the state to the king to the monarch so this entity will then protect us from each other and this is the basis for all society: this is the basis for the social contract. It remains an important idea, and in Deleuzian terms the Leviathan I think remains a sort of diagram of neo-liberalist thinking and, in some sense, capitalist thinking in general because it remains the key idea in some ways, the core assumption, informing the whole liberal tradition, although it may take on softer forms, and though it may believe, like Adam Smith for example, that trade, and enlightened self-interest makes us polite and civilised, it starts from the assumption that the first basic unit of experience is the individual, and the first form of relationship between individuals is the relationship of threat. We pose a threat to each other. And everything else has to be derived from that perspective. And importantly, the only way we can imagine the collectivity is as a sort of giant individual. This is the real reason why I wanted to show you this diagram. The collective looks just like the individual. It doesn’t look like something different. It doesn’t look like an octopus, an amoeba; a plant…the aggregation of individuals becomes an individual itself, a sort of meta-subject. Which is assumed to be in conflict with others actually its assumed that people will form a nation nations will have the same relationship between each other that individual has.
Collectivity itself, the fact of being together, the fact that anything exists in relation to other human beings, other organisms, is not to be looked as something that is outside the object of the individual. It is not thought of as something that can be created, ultimately the job of the collective is just to protect individuals from each other its not to facilitate connections between each other, not to make new kinds of possibility real. And so ultimately, what you get from this is a notion of collectivity that assumes that the only forms of social relations are political. Ten years ago, especially around the Social Forum movement it was very important to make a distinction between the Verticals and the Horizontals. The Verticals are people who believed in vertical power and vertical organisations, in other words, the old Left, the trade unions and everyone on the right, people who believed in vertical lines of command, and the way that organisations should be conducted was through representation and clear lines of representation. The Horizontals are people who believed that social relations and decision-making processes could be horizontal, take place between people, in conditions of relative equality, coming together as they do here [at Occupy] to try and make it happen. My point is that the liberal tradition finds it nearly impossible to think on social relations as potentially horizontal. They can only think of relations between components of the collective in vertical terms. In other words, what defines your membership to the community is your individual relationship to the leader, the idea, to the nation. It’s not your relationship between people. It’s not about you and you and you actually having some kind of mutual interest or mutual collectivity. It’s just that you are loyal to the same state that you are loyal to and you are loyal to. And this is logically where you end up if you have the example of the collectivity only as an aggregation of individuals.
Now historically all of this is bound up with the very specific idea of freedom and what the nature of freedom is ad how this can be understood. The liberal tradition conceives of freedom as the highest good, it thinks that freedom is the most important thing. This is the liberal tradition proper…But it assumes that freedom is absolutely and irreducibly a property of individuals. But what freedom means is freedom from interference by other people, the state, the community, the government. In fact, freedom in this tradition is indissolubly bound up with property. For Hobbes freedom is indissolubly bound up with property. Freedom is a property, something that you have but the only really important freedom is the freedom of the state to guarantee individuals is the freedom to dispose of your property as you like: to own it, spend it, invest it, and use it up however you want. That is the only positive freedom. Now historically this idea has already been countered by various, certain positive conceptions of freedom, both conservative and radical traditions, have tried to counter this idea by saying, well, this is just a negative idea of freedom. You are free from interference but if you don’t have any money, friends, collaborators, a community, you can’t be, you can’t do anything – you can’t act in the world. The way I always put this as an individual, a pure individual, in no relationships with other people, the only real power or freedom you’ll have is to sit in the corner and masturbate until you starve to death. That’s all you can do without the help from other people of some kind.
There are conservative and communitarian traditions that have made this point for a long time. And also in light of the 20th century, the Socialist and Social Democratic traditions. But I think the most relevant for us today is [Peter] Kropotkin, talking about other claims made by the Communist tradition - these stand up to the middle of the 19th century. The Communist tradition always predicated very strongly on this idea that our capacity to act in the world is really dependent on our capacity to relate to other people to create connections and collaborations with others, and on their capacity to relate to us. But all power and therefore all real freedom is a function of collaboration, cooperation and a collective endeavour. This is captured by Marx’s famous assertion that: the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. Now I want to think for a moment about precisely what this assertion means and what it doesn’t mean. What it doesn’t say is that the free development of all is the condition of the free development of each, which is the way this sentiment has been interpreted by mainstream Communism, by social democracy and by the conservative tradition. To say that the free development of all is the condition for the free development of each is to say what is good for the community, for everyone, is what is good for you, and this is the condition for individual flourishing. But this is not what Marx says. He says the free development of each, first, is necessary to the free development of all. This is from the start a libertarian philosophy, but it is one that raises a very difficult stack of questions. For a start, the free development of each what exactly? Each person? Each Individual? If it’s just that then it’s no different from Adam Smith that each individual acts out of self-interest clearly there is something more at stake. This isn’t a question Marx and Engels don’t really get into, they had other things to do, you know, describe capitalism and ferment revolution. But it is something arguably Deleuze and Guattari worked to develop in really important and fruitful ways. This question, the question of the free development of what, of each what…and they answer this question by drawing in a number of other philosophers who all, in their different ways, are concerned with the question of what free development is, and what it might mean, as Spinoza, with his very complicated set of ideas that free development would always be about enhancement of capacities of the body of the individual and the collective. For Spinoza what joy means, what pleasure means, is the enhancement of our capacities. Our own potentiation and the mutual potentiations we can engage with. Incidentally this is why Spinoza is the only alternative theory of pleasure alternative to the Freudian idea of pleasure. The Freudian idea of pleasure is to satisfy a pre-existing need, you’re missing something, you lack something, so pleasure is about getting that thing. Spinoza has a completely different approach. Pleasure isn’t about something that you needed five minutes ago, it’s about something new becoming possible, you become capable of doing something you couldn’t do before: that you didn’t necessarily know that you wanted to do. That is fundamental to Deleuze and Guattari’s re-conceptualisation of desire. The desiring machine is the machine that produces desire, but what they mean by that is not that is it produces needs, lacks, demands: it produces new potentiations, new possibilities…That is one way of developing the idea of the free development of each. Deleuze and Guattari also develop this idea by drawing on Nietzsche, his Will to Power, and strip out some of the elements in Nietzsche’s texts in which the Will to Power seems to be about some kind of individual power, though it really isn’t. Nietzsche himself was absolutely scathing about the idea of the individual. Silly idea. What is an individual? Everything is multiple. Nietzsche said that. And they develop the idea of Henri Bergson, especially his notion of becoming. The idea that becoming that its really important to understand that every part of being in the world is processual. Nothing is ever fixed, everything is always in a process of emergence and becoming, which is important for getting away from some very old traditional ideas as we’ve talked about before, anything from capitalism, to Jeremy Gilbert, to the table being static and fixed, but it’s also important to understand that becoming is not just the individual self development. Becoming also occurs in a set of relationships, the ideal example for Bergson might be evolution, which in this context it is really never accurate to say a species evolved its always an entire ecosystem that evolves. Becoming for Deleuze and Guattari following this kind of idea is affectively defined in part by other sets of coordinates and in part by velocity of escape from and through them.
Potency, agency, freedom are always bound up with a multiplicity of actual and potential connections. This is really a core idea for Deleuze and Guattari. That our agency, our potential for acting in the world and therefore our freedom, is not at all as the liberal tradition believes about having the minimum number of claims on us from other people. In fact it’s the opposite. It’s about maximising our potential for productive connections with others: with other people, with other things, with other ideas.
So this question of well what is it that Deleuze and Guattari think is good what are they for. Well, the American philosopher John Protevi one of the great interpreters and followers of Deleuze and Guattari offer quite a simple answer to this question. He says, What they are in favour of is joyful affects and I’m not going to get into the theorization of affects but lets just say they are in favour of joy. But what joy means to them is precisely the maximization of connections – the maximization of potential connections. Freedom here isn’t predicated on a rejection about sociality and the relationality of our relation to the world, it is a way of inhabiting it. Freedom, in that respect, is an openness. It is that power of volition, which Nick talked about, which emerges, not from any one of us, but between us. What freedom feels like, from this perspective, is to be unconditioned but connected. And what is inevitable about things like identity, to reiterate Nick’s point, freedom is never the defence of an identity. The minute you become invested in an identity is the minute your starts shutting down your potential connections. You are shutting down the process or the potential of becoming. It might sound like a kind of banal remark to make but I’ll have to say, in my own view, and this is having been around political projects, similar to this one, for most of my life, is that this is always the danger that lies in the wake of something like Occupy, this is the most immediate danger…of becoming a site of identification, becoming an identity: are you in or out? Are you Occupy or not? Are you committed enough or not? Do you belong here? Or do you not belong here? The minute that becomes the key political question it stops being politics and it becomes something else.
Jeremy Gilbert at the School of Ideas, two days before it was knocked down.
Deleuze and Guattari and Occupy.
Sat 25th Feb 2-5pm
Occupy LSX / School of Ideas
Featherstone Rd
Islington
EC1Y 8RX
Now in the process of doing that I’ve already started to touch on this question of what is Occupy, what kind of a thing is it? This is something that has come up, and already in Nick’s talk it comes up a lot of the time. Most answers to the question of what kind of kind of thing is Occupy, what is it, are limited to be frank. They are about what it isn’t. It’s not a homogenous entity, it’s not a coherent project, a political agenda, it’s not a set of demands and it’s not a political party et cetera. Occupy is not the first entity about whom that could be said and it’s the most immediate and anticipated in that respect in the social forums, The World Social Forum, the things that were XX was both criticised and praised by different people, for exactly this refusal to become a formal political identity, a project, an agenda. We are told Occupy doesn’t represent. It doesn’t represent a class, it doesn’t represent a nation, it doesn’t represent a people. The problem is I think it’s not enough. At some point you can’t only say it’s not this it’s not that it’s not this it’s not that. And very often the question of well what it is then, and this isn’t just true of Occupy its true to a whole range of projects which Occupy can be related, when that question comes up it becomes unavoidable. There is a real tendency for people, who should know better, to collapse back into an essentially liberal conception and say in effect it’s just an aggregation of liberals, that’s all that it is. The most important example I can think of from the past year or so of that kid of thinking, is at the height of the kind of public success of UK Uncut, a direct action, well it wasn’t direct, it was a protest camp, I’m very fussy about direct action as I grew up in 80s anarchism, and we still using the term direct action to me, pertinently occupying the space or real sabotage you didn’t have to protest – so UK Uncut protest group protested explicitly about the interrelationship between cuts and public services and the refusal of rich institutions and individuals to pay taxes. The evening after the big demonstration on the day of the big national trade union demonstrations, 26 March last year, the black bloc smashed up some windows, which is what they do, and one of the spokespeople of UK uncut who is a very intelligent person, who I’ve met once or twice, who is well spoken and a very articulate, impressive individual, was pressed by an interviewer on this question of UK Uncut as a peaceful nonviolent group and what they think about black bloc’s activities. And of course everyone knows what she thinks. She’s sympathetic to black bloc you know, they’re mostly sixteen, they want to get something out, but obviously it doesn’t really help anything – in terms of the campaign - smashing up Top Shop. But she won’t say this, she can’t say this. And she’s pushed into a corner, because UK Uncut has a position, which Occupy does now, that they don’t really have a position, that they are not an organisation... And I think her exact words were, it’s just up to individuals to decide how they want to behave. Now, this is a nonsense statement from the point of any kind of politics. You can’t predicate a politics on the idea that it’s just up to every individual to do what they want. For the start, if that’s the case, then why should we agree to pay taxes? How can you call upon Philip Green to pay their taxes, then say, on the level of our organisation there is no shared responsibility, there is no collective intentionality, that we are just an aggregation of individuals. I’m not saying this to have a go at this person. I’m just saying to show how persistent that idea is. How persistent this demonstrably and obviously problematic formulation, which is to say instead of being a political party, a homogenous meta-subject, our collective is just an aggregate of individuals, and how problematic that is. This is something that has come up for years and years, it used to come up on Reclaim the Streets…you know, there were some problems, I thought, with Andrew’s formulations at the start of this session, that nobody can speak for Occupy, you can’t speak for occupy I cant speak for Occupy, no one can speak for occupy. Well, again for any kind of way it just leaves you with again the assumption that all you have is an aggregate of individuals. It is not an adequate formulation of what we want from Occupy if we are to say no one can speak for Occupy all you. For me it would be more accurate to say that everyone could speak for Occupy, everyone can speak as occupy, as part of occupy... that would just be a suggestion that I would just throw out, but again this notion that ultimately there can be no form of representation and nobody can give voice to a shared set of views or positions, it always risks falling back into this individualistic conception that all we are is an aggregate of individuals, and I think this is extremely problematic and it’s important to get away from this in some way.
Obviously Occupy is a collective, it’s a collective something, as Nick says it’s a collective which emerges from a process of politicising social relations which I think is a good way of thinking about it. But the impression remains about what kind of something it is, you now, what is it that emerges? And how can something like this think, feel, make decisions, act in a way that is unique to it and which is more than just an aggregation of individual preferences. Because, by the way, if people really want just an aggregation of individual preferences, then you don’t need a collective like Occupy, there is a perfect mechanism for aggregating individual preferences and it’s called the market. In fact, this is exactly neo-liberalism’s own basic proposition about the nature of human social relations that human social relations function best when they are [based on] aggregating individual preferences and the aggregation of individuals. And if that’s what you think and you just want to be in a world where every individual can behave exactly how they want then why engage in radical politics because that is exactly the world that neo-liberalism is trying to create for us. So we have a set of problems here.
So why are Deleuze and Guattari important her? Because Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary, their philosophical project, is motivated as much as anything, by the search for ways of naming, thinking and acting which don’t depend on the legacy of liberal individualism or its authoritarian conservative shadows…you could read through, certainly, the whole of Capitalism and Schizophrenia - the two volumes, their core work - and see it as a series of attempts upon ways of naming, thinking, agency, the ability to act in the world and to be in the world in a way that is not limited by the assumption of liberal individualism, which just assumes that what acts in the world is just an individual, or a kind o meta-individual, I will explain that idea of the meta-individual in a moment.
Certainly, for example, if you take the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia the key concepts which they introduce at the start of either of them are motivated by this kind of thinking. The very first key concept they introduce at the beginning of Anti-Oedipus is the desiring machine. Notoriously difficult concept, I think so difficult to work with and so unclear that they themselves dropped it, they dropped it pretty much by the end of the first book and certainly by the second book. But why did they produce this notion of the machine as this somehow a liberating or progressive idea? Well, for them it was because a machine, or the way they used the term at that time, is arguably a name for anything that makes something happen in the world something that channels energies, that transmutes one kind of energy to another, something that is made from an [aggregation] of different kinds of connection sand they wanted to think about the multifariousness of relations, relations between people, people and objects, objects and objects, animals and ideas, can make things happen in the world in a way that is not limited by the assumptions of the liberal individual that is ultimately going into the individual subject as a source of agency, as a source of power. In the beginning of the second book the discussions of the rhizome is motivated by the same things…I mean, why does the rhizome become an important idea for Deleuze and Guattari? Because the rhizome is a form of organisation between elements, it might be elements in a political project, a corporation, indeed, it might be elements in a biological root system, but it’s one which is characterized by a set of qualities which the liberal tradition doesn’t tend to think of as characterising an effective form of organisation, and I’ll explain why in a moment. And finally this key idea, arguably the key term in A Thousand Plateaus, mentioned in the second book, and gets translated – in the good translations - as ‘assemblage’. In France, it’s agencement, which is a less technical-sounding term than assemblage, it means arrangement, it comes from agencer, partly means to arrange, like arrange flowers or organise things, and also means to pack in some sense.
To some extent Occupy is all these things in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, it’s a desiring machine, it’s a rhizome, it’s an assemblage, it’s an assembly. You know the resonance of these terms isn’t really an accident. Whether this tells us anything really specific about it is an open question because it’s true and it’s worth acknowledging that one of the issues with Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary is that they provide a very good philosophical vocabulary for talking about everything, talking about the world via metaphysics and it’s not clear whether, ultimately, they are telling you something’s happening with a political agency about the object that they are discussing and I think they do, and its important to keep in mind that Occupy might be a desiring machine, but then so is the table, or at least me sitting at the table is a desiring machine, just like it’s an assemblage, just like it’s sort of rhizome to the extent that there isn’t an obvious centre. And I think this might be an answer to Simon’s question about semantics and rhizomatics. Deleuze and Guattari are very careful, especially by the end of Capitalism and Schizophrenia; to not to be saying that rhizome’s are good. They are saying that we inhabit a philosophical tradition, we can find it difficult to think about rhizomes, and again I will explain why in just a moment, and I think it’s particularly important for us to think about them, but ultimately all relations have a rhizomatic connection and an organizing rhizomatic connection, and you can’t just say that rhizomes are good and you know one of the most famous lines of the book, don’t think that if everything was smooth space it would be enough to save us. So the question is then what is it then, what is good and bad with Deleuze and Guattari? I’ll come back to that or I’ll give you somebody else’ very clever answer to that question shortly.
In recent theory another term which has been used to try and designate some of the same properties of the social to all these terms of use […] the multitude of Hardt and Negri, again is a form of collectivity, which doesn’t suppress the identity of its component parts but is nonetheless active as a collectivity and is not simply an aggregation of individuals and the idea of multitude in that sense is inspired partly by Deleuze and Guattari and a sort of Delezo-Guattaro-critique of the history western thinking on some of these subjects, because as I said in the liberal tradition it is impossible to think of the collectivity as anything other than an aggregation of individuals.
So I am going a little bit about this historical idea which I think is important for understanding this current situation and understanding the neoliberal context in particular. What you see here is the frontispiece of a book called Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, it was published in 1651 and is often cited as the first significant text of political philosophy in the West. I mean you could go back to the Greeks, but certainly in the modern period. You can see that the Leviathan is a sort of giant figure and what it is made up of, its component parts, are all these individual figures. It’s described as a giant man made up of lots of men. Leviathan expresses the Hobbsian idea that what defines the collective, is that it is essentially always an aggregation of individuals whose connection between other members of the collective is completely dependent on their relationship to this one giant figure; the sovereign, the symbol of authority. Hobbes makes an argument for all kinds of thing and he’s an interesting figure because he is sort of the fountainhead of both the liberal tradition and the kind of authoritarian tradition. But Hobbes is famously the first person who posits what he calls the state at nature, there is no abstract state, it doesn’t really exist and historically, in the kind of unconditioned state, human beings are competitive individuals; they are not naturally cooperative or spontaneously communitarian. If they don’t find some way of defending themselves from each other the natural relationship between people is one of fear and risk. Individuals pose a risk to each other before anything else and so the idea is the reason we enter into any kind of society or collectivity is essentially to defend ourselves from the risk of violence posed by others. So what we do is we concede our individual sovereignty to the state to the king to the monarch so this entity will then protect us from each other and this is the basis for all society: this is the basis for the social contract. It remains an important idea, and in Deleuzian terms the Leviathan I think remains a sort of diagram of neo-liberalist thinking and, in some sense, capitalist thinking in general because it remains the key idea in some ways, the core assumption, informing the whole liberal tradition, although it may take on softer forms, and though it may believe, like Adam Smith for example, that trade, and enlightened self-interest makes us polite and civilised, it starts from the assumption that the first basic unit of experience is the individual, and the first form of relationship between individuals is the relationship of threat. We pose a threat to each other. And everything else has to be derived from that perspective. And importantly, the only way we can imagine the collectivity is as a sort of giant individual. This is the real reason why I wanted to show you this diagram. The collective looks just like the individual. It doesn’t look like something different. It doesn’t look like an octopus, an amoeba; a plant…the aggregation of individuals becomes an individual itself, a sort of meta-subject. Which is assumed to be in conflict with others actually its assumed that people will form a nation nations will have the same relationship between each other that individual has.
Collectivity itself, the fact of being together, the fact that anything exists in relation to other human beings, other organisms, is not to be looked as something that is outside the object of the individual. It is not thought of as something that can be created, ultimately the job of the collective is just to protect individuals from each other its not to facilitate connections between each other, not to make new kinds of possibility real. And so ultimately, what you get from this is a notion of collectivity that assumes that the only forms of social relations are political. Ten years ago, especially around the Social Forum movement it was very important to make a distinction between the Verticals and the Horizontals. The Verticals are people who believed in vertical power and vertical organisations, in other words, the old Left, the trade unions and everyone on the right, people who believed in vertical lines of command, and the way that organisations should be conducted was through representation and clear lines of representation. The Horizontals are people who believed that social relations and decision-making processes could be horizontal, take place between people, in conditions of relative equality, coming together as they do here [at Occupy] to try and make it happen. My point is that the liberal tradition finds it nearly impossible to think on social relations as potentially horizontal. They can only think of relations between components of the collective in vertical terms. In other words, what defines your membership to the community is your individual relationship to the leader, the idea, to the nation. It’s not your relationship between people. It’s not about you and you and you actually having some kind of mutual interest or mutual collectivity. It’s just that you are loyal to the same state that you are loyal to and you are loyal to. And this is logically where you end up if you have the example of the collectivity only as an aggregation of individuals.
Now historically all of this is bound up with the very specific idea of freedom and what the nature of freedom is ad how this can be understood. The liberal tradition conceives of freedom as the highest good, it thinks that freedom is the most important thing. This is the liberal tradition proper…But it assumes that freedom is absolutely and irreducibly a property of individuals. But what freedom means is freedom from interference by other people, the state, the community, the government. In fact, freedom in this tradition is indissolubly bound up with property. For Hobbes freedom is indissolubly bound up with property. Freedom is a property, something that you have but the only really important freedom is the freedom of the state to guarantee individuals is the freedom to dispose of your property as you like: to own it, spend it, invest it, and use it up however you want. That is the only positive freedom. Now historically this idea has already been countered by various, certain positive conceptions of freedom, both conservative and radical traditions, have tried to counter this idea by saying, well, this is just a negative idea of freedom. You are free from interference but if you don’t have any money, friends, collaborators, a community, you can’t be, you can’t do anything – you can’t act in the world. The way I always put this as an individual, a pure individual, in no relationships with other people, the only real power or freedom you’ll have is to sit in the corner and masturbate until you starve to death. That’s all you can do without the help from other people of some kind.
There are conservative and communitarian traditions that have made this point for a long time. And also in light of the 20th century, the Socialist and Social Democratic traditions. But I think the most relevant for us today is [Peter] Kropotkin, talking about other claims made by the Communist tradition - these stand up to the middle of the 19th century. The Communist tradition always predicated very strongly on this idea that our capacity to act in the world is really dependent on our capacity to relate to other people to create connections and collaborations with others, and on their capacity to relate to us. But all power and therefore all real freedom is a function of collaboration, cooperation and a collective endeavour. This is captured by Marx’s famous assertion that: the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. Now I want to think for a moment about precisely what this assertion means and what it doesn’t mean. What it doesn’t say is that the free development of all is the condition of the free development of each, which is the way this sentiment has been interpreted by mainstream Communism, by social democracy and by the conservative tradition. To say that the free development of all is the condition for the free development of each is to say what is good for the community, for everyone, is what is good for you, and this is the condition for individual flourishing. But this is not what Marx says. He says the free development of each, first, is necessary to the free development of all. This is from the start a libertarian philosophy, but it is one that raises a very difficult stack of questions. For a start, the free development of each what exactly? Each person? Each Individual? If it’s just that then it’s no different from Adam Smith that each individual acts out of self-interest clearly there is something more at stake. This isn’t a question Marx and Engels don’t really get into, they had other things to do, you know, describe capitalism and ferment revolution. But it is something arguably Deleuze and Guattari worked to develop in really important and fruitful ways. This question, the question of the free development of what, of each what…and they answer this question by drawing in a number of other philosophers who all, in their different ways, are concerned with the question of what free development is, and what it might mean, as Spinoza, with his very complicated set of ideas that free development would always be about enhancement of capacities of the body of the individual and the collective. For Spinoza what joy means, what pleasure means, is the enhancement of our capacities. Our own potentiation and the mutual potentiations we can engage with. Incidentally this is why Spinoza is the only alternative theory of pleasure alternative to the Freudian idea of pleasure. The Freudian idea of pleasure is to satisfy a pre-existing need, you’re missing something, you lack something, so pleasure is about getting that thing. Spinoza has a completely different approach. Pleasure isn’t about something that you needed five minutes ago, it’s about something new becoming possible, you become capable of doing something you couldn’t do before: that you didn’t necessarily know that you wanted to do. That is fundamental to Deleuze and Guattari’s re-conceptualisation of desire. The desiring machine is the machine that produces desire, but what they mean by that is not that is it produces needs, lacks, demands: it produces new potentiations, new possibilities…That is one way of developing the idea of the free development of each. Deleuze and Guattari also develop this idea by drawing on Nietzsche, his Will to Power, and strip out some of the elements in Nietzsche’s texts in which the Will to Power seems to be about some kind of individual power, though it really isn’t. Nietzsche himself was absolutely scathing about the idea of the individual. Silly idea. What is an individual? Everything is multiple. Nietzsche said that. And they develop the idea of Henri Bergson, especially his notion of becoming. The idea that becoming that its really important to understand that every part of being in the world is processual. Nothing is ever fixed, everything is always in a process of emergence and becoming, which is important for getting away from some very old traditional ideas as we’ve talked about before, anything from capitalism, to Jeremy Gilbert, to the table being static and fixed, but it’s also important to understand that becoming is not just the individual self development. Becoming also occurs in a set of relationships, the ideal example for Bergson might be evolution, which in this context it is really never accurate to say a species evolved its always an entire ecosystem that evolves. Becoming for Deleuze and Guattari following this kind of idea is affectively defined in part by other sets of coordinates and in part by velocity of escape from and through them.
Potency, agency, freedom are always bound up with a multiplicity of actual and potential connections. This is really a core idea for Deleuze and Guattari. That our agency, our potential for acting in the world and therefore our freedom, is not at all as the liberal tradition believes about having the minimum number of claims on us from other people. In fact it’s the opposite. It’s about maximising our potential for productive connections with others: with other people, with other things, with other ideas.
So this question of well what is it that Deleuze and Guattari think is good what are they for. Well, the American philosopher John Protevi one of the great interpreters and followers of Deleuze and Guattari offer quite a simple answer to this question. He says, What they are in favour of is joyful affects and I’m not going to get into the theorization of affects but lets just say they are in favour of joy. But what joy means to them is precisely the maximization of connections – the maximization of potential connections. Freedom here isn’t predicated on a rejection about sociality and the relationality of our relation to the world, it is a way of inhabiting it. Freedom, in that respect, is an openness. It is that power of volition, which Nick talked about, which emerges, not from any one of us, but between us. What freedom feels like, from this perspective, is to be unconditioned but connected. And what is inevitable about things like identity, to reiterate Nick’s point, freedom is never the defence of an identity. The minute you become invested in an identity is the minute your starts shutting down your potential connections. You are shutting down the process or the potential of becoming. It might sound like a kind of banal remark to make but I’ll have to say, in my own view, and this is having been around political projects, similar to this one, for most of my life, is that this is always the danger that lies in the wake of something like Occupy, this is the most immediate danger…of becoming a site of identification, becoming an identity: are you in or out? Are you Occupy or not? Are you committed enough or not? Do you belong here? Or do you not belong here? The minute that becomes the key political question it stops being politics and it becomes something else.
Jeremy Gilbert at the School of Ideas, two days before it was knocked down.
Deleuze and Guattari and Occupy.
Sat 25th Feb 2-5pm
Occupy LSX / School of Ideas
Featherstone Rd
Islington
EC1Y 8RX