Nicholas Tampio教授论文全文（1）

Nicholas Tampio教授论文全文（1）

Entering Deleuze’s Political Vision

Nicholas Tampio Fordham University Abstract

How can Deleuziansmake his philosophy as accessible as possible to political theorists anddemocratic publics? This essay provides principles to enter Deleuze’s politicalvision, namely, to research the etymology of words, to discover the imagebeneath concepts, to diagram schemata using rigid lines, supple lines and linesof flight, and to construct rules that balance experimentation and caution. Theessay then employs this method to explicate a fecund sentence about politics inA Thousand Plateaus and presents a case why Deleuze deserves greatervisibility in the political theory canon.

Keywords: A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze, democracy,philosophy, politics, vision

The task ofpolitical philosophy–according to Sheldon Wolin in his classic text, Politicsand Vision–is to 'fashion a political cosmos out of political chaos’ (Wolin2004: 9). Many of the great statements of political philosophy arise in timesof crisis, that is, when old paradigms and institutions have been shattered –for instance, in post-war Europe (Reggio 2007). A political philosopheradvances a political metaphysics that includes categories of time, space,reality and energy; he or she describes what exists, but, more importantly,illuminates 'tantalizing possibilities’ to inspire the formation of a betterworld (Wolin 2004: 20). A political philosopher may have a method, that is, astep-by-step procedure for initiates to arrive at predetermined destinations,but what gives a political philosophy richness is 'extra-scientific considerations’,that is, knowledge of literature, cinema, religion, metaphysics, scientific

Deleuze Studies 8.1 (2014): 1–22 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.0131© EdinburghUniversity Press www.euppublishing.com/dls

2 Nicholas Tampio

developments inother fields of inquiry, and the history of ideas (Wolin 1969). A politicalphilosopher participates in a tradition of discourse, an ongoing conversationabout how to order collective human life. And yet a great political philosopherinnovates, that is, expresses a vision that no one has seen before, in the sameway that Van Gogh’s paintings have changed how many of us view sunflowers orstarry nights. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seems, we needa new epochal political theory to make sense of our fast-paced, interconnectedworld in which multiple constituencies interact on many registers of being(Connolly 2002).

Deleuze may be becoming'our Kant’, that is, the philosopher who orients contemporary discussions ofepistemology, metaphysics, ethics, politics and aesthetics in the same way thatKant dominated those discussions in the high Enlightenment (Protevi 2001: 6–7;see also Negri 1995: 108). Take Deleuze’s magnus opus, A Thousand Plateaus.1 The bookconstructs a stunning array of concepts to redescribe political time ('thegeology of morals’), political space ('smooth’ and 'striated’, 'territory’,'earth’ and 'the Natal’), political bodies ('assemblages’, 'rhizomes’, 'bodieswithout organs’, 'multiplicities’, 'apparatuses of capture’ and 'war machines’)and political energy ('macro- and micropolitics’). On the one hand, the bookdisplays Deleuze’s apprenticeship in the history of philosophy, with conceptsrecast from Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Bergson, Nietzsche and others (Jones and Roffe2009). On the other, Deleuze presents a singular vision that seems toaccomplish the mission he assigned transcendental philosophy in Differenceand Repetition: to explore the upper and lower reaches of this world, thatis, the mysterious factors that influence politics but that elude traditionalcategories of political science (Deleuze 1994: 135). For many leftist politicaltheorists and activists today, Deleuze provides the impetus to replace orreformulate Marxist–Leninist and liberal–republican paradigms (Svirsky 2010).

Anyone who hasread or taught A Thousand Plateaus knows, however, that the entry costto glimpsing Deleuze’s political vision is high. Consider, for example, IanBuchanan’s 'preliminary guide for how to get started’ reading the first volumeof Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (Buchanan 2008:152). Buchanan recommends that newcomers to that book examine Deleuze’s earlierwork (particularly Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense,Empiricism and Subjectivity, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Dialoguesand Negotiations), study the classic texts of psychoanalysis(including by Freud, Lacan, Bettelheim, Klein and Reich), master the literatureon

Entering Deleuze’s Political Vision 3

historicalmaterialism (including books by Foucault, Sartre, Fanon and Turner) and perusethe referenced literary sources (including by Artaud, Lawrence, Proust,Beckett, Büchner, Nerval and Butler). Presumably, once one has accomplishedthis task, then one may begin to tackle the imposing secondary literaturesaddressed in A Thousand Plateaus on geology, linguistics, politics,aesthetics and (a thousand?) other topics. To be sure, great philosophersalways demand time and effort and generate multifaceted research projects.Given that Deleuze envisioned his philosophy as an 'open system’, whereby'concepts relate to circumstances rather than essences’, Deleuze scholars mayrightly rejoice at all the myriad directions contemporary Deleuzians mayexplore (Deleuze 2005: 32). Yet setting the intellectual bar to enteringDeleuze’s political vision too high may confirm the accusation that Deleuze isa 'highly elitist author, indifferent toward politics’ (Žižek 2003: 20). Is therea way to make Deleuze’s 'grand style’ (Olkowski 2011) more accessible withoutcompromising its intellectual rigour or precision? May one democratiseDeleuze’s esoteric or hermetic passages, as it were, without collapsing intocommon sense?2

One of the moresurprising remarks that Deleuze made in an interview about A ThousandPlateaus – a book in which one protagonist, Professor Challenger, empties alecture hall (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 64)–is that he wants to forgealliances with like-minded people:

The question that interests us inrelation to A Thousand Plateaus is whether there are any resonances,common ground, with what other writers, musicians, painters, philosophers, andsociologists are doing or trying to do, from which we can all derive greaterstrength or confidence. (Deleuze 2005: 27)3

Deleuze wasindifferent, though not necessarily hostile, to many features of democraticpolitics as traditionally understood, including governance by the majority andthe rule of public opinion (Patton 2010a: 161–84). Yet Deleuze declared himselfa leftist (homme de gauche) and envisioned a left composed of an'aggregate of processes of minoritarian becomings’ in which everybody has somehand in governance though no one easily identifiable group (majority) dominates(Deleuze and Parnet 1996; see also Tampio 2009). Deleuze saw A ThousandPlateaus as a work of left political philosophy and wanted his book to becomprehensible to a wide array of people (each of whom is plied by differenceand does not fit neatly into categories that define a majority). Deleuze didnot think or desire his work to be easily accessible to currently existing masspopulations, but he also did not envision himself as a beautiful soul who

4 Nicholas Tampio

cared about hisown salvation rather than the well-being of society.4 The question remains, though, how canDeleuzians advance the project of identifying or making common ground with anarray of intellectuals and activists to enact concrete change? How can one makeA Thousand Plateaus as easy to understand as possible while stillhonouring Deleuze’s vision in all its singularity and complexity andinjunctions to use it as a toolbox rather than as a package containing asettled meaning (Buchanan 2000)?

This essayproposes a handful of principles to facilitate entering Deleuze’s politicalvision. Initially, I offer several rules of thumb that make Deleuze’s politicaltheory comprehensible with little more than a good dictionary and sketchpad. Toextract these rules I plumb Deleuze’s writings on Hume, Nietzsche and Bergson,as well as his books written in his own voice; and, once again, I emphasisethat Deleuze’s political theory 'ceaselessly establishes connections betweensemiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to thearts, sciences, and social struggles’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 7). Deleuze’sphilosophy is an intricate, plastic and porous system that demands both carefulstudy and receptivity to developments in philosophy, art, science and politics.5 There is no royalroad to Deleuzian political philosophy: but there are straighter ones. Tosubstantiate this point, I explicate a sentence that contains an importantpolitical teaching of A Thousand Plateaus. The aim is not to simplifythe Deleuzian 'abstract machine’, or conceptual system, but to present a way todiagram the machinery so that others may more readily plug into it. I concludeby explaining why Deleuze deserves a more prominent place in the academicpolitical theory canon.

I. ThePolitical Vision of AThousand Plateaus

To comprehend what is is thetask of philosophy, for what is is reason. As far as the individual isconcerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time; thusphilosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts. (Hegel 1991:21)

A ThousandPlateaus may be thephilosophical work that best captures our time in thought. Such a statementmust immediately be qualified. Deleuze’s entire philosophical corpus evades andopposes the Hegelian account of the phenomenology of spirit (Hardt 1993; Widder2008). Each chapter title of A Thousand Plateaus has a date, but thedates are not arranged sequentially, thus subverting any attempt to find a

Entering Deleuze’s Political Vision 5

historicalmetanarrative that explains humanity’s roots or telos. Deleuze prefersto view history stratographically, rather than chronologically, meaning that'luminous points’, physical or noetic, from the past may rise up to enrich ordisrupt the present (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 59; see also Lampert 2006). Yetour time expresses its own singularity, both because of political, economic,technological and social changes from earlier milieus – such as the collapse ofthe Soviet Union, the accelerated construction of global markets, the emergenceof the Internet, and the growing consensus in favour of treating men and womenas equals – as well as because the historical archive has a renewed vitality inour age. Today, we can travel the world quickly in thought and extension andthus take an interest in the history of humanity, religion, science, music,mathematics, the state, capitalism and other topics discussed in A ThousandPlateaus. Such investigations are spurred by curiosity, but also by apractical conviction that we have a much broader palette of ideas and practicesthan heretofore to paint, in words and deeds, our time. In this essay, Iindicate why Deleuze may be the philosopher who best expresses the spirit of theage, though a fuller defence of his paradigm will require the sustained effortof Deleuzian political theorists to show its timeliness.

A ThousandPlateaus stretches theGreek definition of politics as ta politika, that which happens in a polis,or city. Take the sentence: 'everything is political, but every politics issimultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics’ (Deleuze andGuattari 1987: 213). Most political scientists view politics as 'who gets what,when, and how’ (Lasswell 1936). Deleuze differs from most political scientistsby refusing to privilege human rational actors as the main or sole actants inthe political realm as well as by attributing primary motivation tosub-representational desires rather than self-conscious interests. Politicalscientists may enter Deleuze’s terminology by distinguishing levels ofanalysis, from state policies and elections to public opinion and politicalpsychology. But that entry point may misrepresent the elusive and mysteriousfeatures of the micropolitical that Deleuze wants to illuminate. Deleuze viewsthe political, in terminology he primarily used in the late 1960s, as an Idea.An Idea is a 'virtual multiplicity’ defined by 'differential relations’ and'concomitant singularities’ (Deleuze 2004: 100). Like a Platonic Idea, theDeleuzian Idea transcends the actual world that we perceive with our naked eyesand helps structure, or pilot, those things that we see and touch. Deleuze’sIdea, though, is Dionysian, or wild, combating every effort to place an Apollonian,or static, framework upon it (Deleuze 2004: 101; see also Smith 2012: 106–21).

6 Nicholas Tampio

In the defence ofhis doctorat d’État, published as 'The Method of Dramatization’, Deleuzeuses terms that are both philosophic and poetic to describe the elusive forcesthat press us to think anew: Ideas inhabit 'a zone of obscure distinction’ thatgenerates more stable concepts and things, but Ideas also have an intrinsicpower to overturn established orders (Deleuze 2004: 101). Like Hannah Arendt,Deleuze celebrates the political as the site of natality, the capacity to givebirth to something new (Arendt 1998). Deleuze differs from Arendt, though,through his astonishing statement that everything–not just humans in theircivic or personal roles–is political. Deleuze stretches and deepens the fieldthat political theorists may investigate to determine how we–now including thetrans- and non-human–do and ought to live together in the universe.6

So is it proper todescribe A Thousand Plateaus as a work of political philosophy orpolitical theory? Political philosophy, in academic po- litical sciencedepartments, often refers to the quest 'to replace opinion about the nature ofpolitical things by knowledge of the nature of political things’ (Strauss 1989:5). Deleuze does not endorse Platonic metaphysics or its accompanying elitistpolitics, but given his extensive reflections on the nature of philosophy, wemay still consider the possibility that he is a political philosopher. In the1960s, Sheldon Wolin argued for a type of political philosophy–subsequentlycalled political theory–that privileges the exercise of the imagination overreason. In this respect, Deleuze–whose first book, Empiricism andSubjectivity, dedicates a chapter to the power of the imagination in ethicsand knowledge – would probably call himself a political theorist. But does thisterm connote a dualism – between theory and practice, or possible and realexperience–that Deleuze sought to overcome (Smith 2012: 89–105)? Theoria,in Greek, means 'a looking at’ (from thea 'a view’ + horan 'tosee’); praxis, from the Greek prattein 'to do’, means 'action’.Theory, put simply, is what we do with our eyes and practice is what we do withour hands. The Platonic tradition tries to maintain a sharp distinction betweenthese two activities. Deleuze recasts this dualism rather than discards itentirely. In an interview with Michel Foucault called 'Intellectuals andPower’, Deleuze explains:

The relationships between theory andpractice are [. . . ] partial and fragmentary. On one side, a theory is alwayslocal and related to a limited field, and it is applied in another sphere, moreor less distant from it [...] Practice is a set of relays from one theoreticalpoint to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theorycan develop without eventually

Entering Deleuze’s Political Vision 7

encountering a wall, and practice isnecessary for piercing this wall. (Foucault 1977: 206)7

For Deleuze, it issenseless to talk of disembodied philosophising. We always inhabit bodies thatinteract with other bodies in concrete physical locations. Nerves connect oureyes and hands, and skin is porous. There is an open circuit linking the imagesin our eyes, concepts in our brains, sensations on our fingertips, and actionsof other bodies.8 And yet, Deleuze insists, the relationshipbetween sensibility and thinking is asymmetrical, meaning that there is alwaysa disjunction between Ideas and concepts, on one side, and actuality on theother. Corporeal practices can jolt thinking, but they cannot determine it.Conversely, Ideas and concepts can prompt action that transforms the politicalsphere, but there is always friction in the transition from theory to practice.Deleuzian political theory is a sort of practice insofar as it enriches ourvision of political possibilities and inspires us to work toward goals thatwould otherwise have remained occluded or unimagined.

II. How toEnter Deleuze’s Political Vision

Let us now proposea few rules, extracted from years of reading and teaching A ThousandPlateaus, to facilitate a deeper comprehension of its political vision.

First Rule:Track Etymology

A philosophermasters concepts in the same way that a painter masters percepts or an authormasters affects (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). Deleuze’s method minimises as faras possible 'typographical, lexical, or syntactic creations’ (Deleuze andGuattari 1987: 22). Deleuze’s language is both strange and familiar.9 How? In his Introductionto Kant’s Anthropology, Foucault notes that Romance languages follow 'thesecret law of a Latinity [. . . ] which serves to guarantee the intrinsicexchange value of what is said’ (Foucault 2008: 98). If one uses a dictionaryto find the etymology of Deleuze’s concepts in A Thousand Plateaus, onealmost inevitably finds a Latin, Greek and/or Indo- European root. One of thekey concepts of A Thousand Plateaus, for instance, territory (territoire)–andits cognates territorialisation and deterritorialisation–emerges from both'earth, land’ (terra) and 'to terrorise’ (terrere) (Connolly1995: xxii).10

8 Nicholas Tampio

Why does Deleuzesay that 'etymology is like a specifically philosophical athleticism’ (Deleuzeand Guattari 1994: 8) or that we learn to think in dictionaries (Deleuze 2005:165)? Clearly, a philosopher must master the art of thinking and concepts arethe basic thought units that enable us to mentally grasp the sensible.Intuitions without concepts are blind: to see with our minds, we need to have areservoir of concepts. The purpose of Deleuze’s earliest philosophicalmonographs is precisely to practise using mental tools and weapons that he canredeploy in his own philosophy (Deleuze 2005: xv). Reading a dictionary doesnot suffice to think new thoughts, but it is crucial exercise in aphilosophical apprenticeship.

In addition,studying etymology lets you recover a language before Christianity 'ruined theRoman preservation of the Greek enlightenment’ (Lampert 1996: 174). WhenDeleuze uses an ordinary word 'filled with harmonics so distant that it risksbeing imperceptible to a nonphilosophical ear’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 8)he is taking up the project of the Nietzschean Enlightenment: to resituate theaccomplishments of the 'West’ upon an Epicurean, rather than a Platonic,metaphysical foundation (Lampert 1996: 166–86). 'The untimely is attained inrelation to the most distant past, by the reversal of Platonism’ – and the wayto do that is to use words in a sense before they were overcoded by democraticPlatonism, or Christianity (Deleuze 1990: 265). In sum, Deleuze, likeNietzsche, thinks the art of etymology empowers one to think clearly and in away that circumvents, at least in part, the Christian inheritance (Nietzsche2007: 34).

Second Rule:Find Images

Let us dwell moreon why etymology helps clarify thinking. One of the surprising features ofresearching the etymology for concepts in Deleuze’s most abstract, densepassages is that virtually all of them have a root in a concrete object. 'Artthinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts’(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 66). Hegel drew a sharp line between concepts andpercepts: 'in thinking, the object does not present itself inpicture-thoughts but in Notions, i.e. in a distinct being-in-itself’(Hegel 1977: 120). According to the Hegelian narrative of the history ofphilosophy, primitives (such as the Egyptians) thought in terms of images andsculptures, whereas the march of self- consciousness is defined by itsabstraction into concepts or Notions.

Entering Deleuze’s Political Vision 9

Deleuze, on thisfront as on many others, opposes Hegel’s effect on philosophy. This is howDeleuze advises a fellow philosopher:

In the analysis of concepts, it isalways better to begin with extremely simple, concrete situations, not withphilosophical antecedents, not even with problems as such (the one andthe multiple, etc.). Take multiplicities, for example. You want to begin withquestions such as what is a pack? [...] I have only one thing to tellyou: stick to the concrete, and always return to it. (Deleuze 2006: 362–3)

Deleuze, like manyof the canonical figures in the history of political philosophy, 'sticks to theconcrete’, even if the concrete today differs from that of earlier eras.11

Deleuze’s defenceof picture-thinking goes back at least to his reading of Hume. In A Treatiseof Human Nature, Hume extols Berkeley’s idea that 'all general ideas arenothing but particular ones, annex’d to a certain term, which gives them a moreextensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals,which are similar to them’ (Hume 2000: 17). Abstract ideas always bear thetrace of a sensation or impression: 'the image in the mind is only that of aparticular object, tho’ the application of our reasoning be the same, as if itwere universal’ (Hume 2000: 18). Thinking cannot be reduced to sensations givento us: Deleuze and arguably even Hume himself recognise that the mind imposesconceptual casting upon the raw material of sensation (Kerslake 2009: 4). YetDeleuze shared Hume’s suspicion of a priori theorising and thought that it ledto duplicity or confusion. That is why Deleuze opens the English translation ofDialogues by declaring that he has always been an empiricist, committedto tracing 'concepts from the lines that compose multiplicities’ (Deleuze andParnet 2007: viii).

Finding the image,though, does not mean sticking to the banal. Hume’s example of returning to theeveryday, famously, is playing a game of backgammon (Hume 2000: 175). Deleuzecalls his project transcendental empiricism, however, to suggest that weneed to experiment with our philosophical studies and corporeal practices toopen the aperture through which we receive the world. “'Transcendentalempiricism” is a kind of cognition that violates the normal rules ofexperience, yet nevertheless attains a “superior” realisation of sensation,imagination and thought’ (Kerslake 2009: 26; see also Colebrook 2002: 69–89).Deleuze is an empiricist, but he resists the attempts to domesticate thefaculties through the doctrines of good and common sense. To visualise thestrange, we may need to employ intellectual and

10 Nicholas Tampio

visceraltechniques on our singular and collective bodies (see Connolly 2002: 80–113).

Third Rule:Diagram Schemata

A ThousandPlateaus uses the method of'stratoanalysis’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 22). Stratum is from the Latin stratum'layer’ (and the Indo-European base *stre-to- 'to stretch’);analysis is from the Greek analysis 'break up, unfastening’.Stratoanalysis means to diagram the layers, sides and components of a body.Deleuze wrote his book on Francis Bacon with reproductions of the paintings infront of him (Smith 2005: xi). One helpful exercise when reading Deleuze’stexts is to reverse this project: to diagram their conceptual arrangements, orschemata.12

In What IsPhilosophy? Deleuze advises philosophers to master 'the art of theportrait’:

It is not a matter of 'makinglifelike’, that is, of repeating what a philosopher said but rather ofproducing resemblance by separating out both the plane of immanence heinstituted and the new concepts he created. These are mental, noetic, andmachinic portraits. Although they are usually created with philosophical tools,they can also be produced aesthetically. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 55)

A 'noetic’portrait–from Greek nous 'mind’–represents the structure and content,the bones and flesh, of a philosophical argument. We need to grasp aphilosophical argument with our minds; but we can also use our hands and eyesto make the argument more intuitive.

Take, for example,the paragraph from A Thousand Plateaus that opens: 'Let us consider thethree great strata concerning us, in other words, the ones that most directlybind us: the organism, signifiance, and subjectification’ (Deleuze and Guattari1987: 159). One way to diagram this argument is to draw a circle with acompass, lifting the head frequently to convey 'the principles of connectionand heterogeneity’ that makes all borders in the universe porous (Deleuze andGuattari 1987: 7). Then, with a ruler, one may draw lines to make three strata,which may be labelled organism (body), signifiance (soul) and subjectification.And yet, the purpose of this paragraph is to draw attention to the side of thebody (the one facing the pole of scission) that fluctuates and decomposes.13 We may then makeone side of our circle more perforated, with lines of flight fleeing this sideof the body, and label the strata disarticulation, experimentation and nomadism(Figure 1). There is much more work to do to make this paragraph comprehensible

Entering Deleuze’s Political Vision 11

Figure 1. A diagram of the schema for A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 159–60).

or usable: but wecan begin to appreciate the Apollonian (and not just Dionysian) features ofDeleuzian political theory.

This strategy alsogives us a clue to why Deleuze calls his philosophy a 'constructivism’ in WhatIs Philosophy? Like Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, Deleuzethinks that philosophers can gain insight from mathematicians about how toconstruct concepts, objects and figures. What makes Deleuze a Kantian is hisrecognition that we draw the lines that define our concepts and mentalrepresentations of reality. Yet, in his practical philosophy, Kant thinks that purepractical reason lays the ground for the object of our striving (the 'realmof ends’), whereas Deleuze agrees with Hume that imagination is the key facultyof ethical and political thinking (Deleuze 1991: 55–72). The significance of thisfact, for us, is that each of us may draw or fill in the schema with our ownimpure content. Just as there are no straight lines in nature, so too there areno straight lines in Deleuzian schemata (a wooden, plastic or metal ruleralways has tiny divots). That is why Deleuze recommends cartography rather thandecalcomania, map-making rather

-未完待续-