Deleuze and Guattari's Immanent Ethics

Theory, Subjectivity, and Duration

Tamsin Lorraine

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781438436647
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In Deleuze and Guattari's Immanent Ethics, Tamsin Lorraine focuses on the pragmatic implications of Deleuze and Guattari's work for human beings struggling to live ethical lives. Her bold alignment of Deleuze and Guattari's project with the feminist and phenomenological projects of grounding human action in lived experience provides an accessible introduction to their work. Lorraine characterizes Deleuze and Guattari's nonfoundational approach to ethics in terms of a notion of power that comes into skillful confluence with the multiple forces of life and an immanent principle of flourishing, while their conception of philosophical thought is portrayed as an intervention in the ongoing movement of life that she enacts in her own exploration of their ideas. She contends that Deleuze and Guattari advocate unfolding the potential of our becoming in ways that enhance our participation in the creative evolution of life, and she characterizes forms of subjectivity and cultural practice that could support such evolution. By means of her lucid reading taken through the lens of feminist philosophy, Lorraine is not only able to present clearly Deleuze and Guattari's project but also an intriguing elaboration of some of the project's practical implications for novel approaches to contemporary problems in philosophy, feminism, cultural theory, and human living.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are two theorists (one an academic philosopher, the other an activist and antipsychiatrist as well as theorist) who wrote a remarkable series of books together.¹ Coming out of the same traditions of phenomenology and structuralism as French “poststructuralist” thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault,² their work also is informed by the “maverick” philosophies of Benedict Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson.³ Their ontology of self-organizing processes and becoming rather than substance and being entails conceptions of time (as duration rather than chronology), subjectivity (as a dynamic process always in relation rather than an autonomous subject), and ethics (as premised on immanent criteria rather than transcendental ideals) with galvanizing potential for resolving ethical and political questions about who we are and how we should live with human as well as nonhuman others in a world that is rapidly changing.

The reading I give here of Deleuze and Guattari's work suggests that it is through open-ended attunement with the multiple forces of our life that we can unfold, rather than attempt to dictate or control, the responses that will best serve the evolving capacities of the interdependent life-forms of the communities to which we belong. Deleuze and Guattari's conception of an immanent ethics calls on us to attend to the situations of our lives in all their textured specificity and to open ourselves up to responses that go beyond a repertoire of comfortably familiar, automatic reactions and instead access creative solutions to what are always unique problems. My reading of their conception of ethics emphasizes its pragmatic efficacy for resolving the often-painful dissonance we experience as embodied human beings struggling to live good lives. Although progressive thinkers and activists have not yet achieved a world where change is no longer needed (despite some claims to the contrary), our concerns have shifted as the world changes, and theory has attempted—often with great success—to keep pace with these changes. With this book, I hope to contribute to such efforts by rendering a Deleuze–Guattarian approach to life accessible in light of questions about what it means to be human, normative and alternative conceptions of identity and subjectivity, and ethical and political questions about how we can live from day to day as well as work toward making the world a better place.

Deleuze and Guattari's conception of doing theory is that of an intervention that can help one answer the question of “how one might live” rather than a representation of the world (May 2005, 1–25). Philosophy, in their view, is (or should be) an evolving force that affects and is affected by other forces as they play out over time; meaning unfolds and evolves through the differentiated becoming of the multiple forces of life. This perspective prompts a creative approach toward reading and writing theory as well as toward thinking. Arresting the dynamic force of concepts by restricting their meanings to past formulations overlooks how their meanings evolve in response to the shifting configurations of the life problems they address. Far from prompting an anarchic sloppiness, Deleuze and Guattari's approach invites tracking the subtleties of meaning that emerge when one attends to the texture of specific contexts. Concepts cannot mean in abstraction from life; their power can only unfold in relation to other concepts as well as the heterogeneous forces of life as evolution. Unfolding incipient meanings of concepts in ways that will suggest satisfying solutions to the problems life poses requires skillful attunement to the interrelations of words to other words as well as words and the material situations in and through which words mean.

Deleuze and Guattari's conception of an immanent ethics and politics premised on affirming what is as well as unfolding what could become invites creative resolution of the obstacles that prevent us from our individual and collective thriving. Their life-affirming approach attends to what Susan McManus in a recent article terms the “affective register of subjectivity” in ways that prompt resolution of “nihilistic blockages in agency” (McManus 2007, 1–2) and instigates the belief in the earth and the invention of a new people for which Deleuze and Guattari call. Furthermore, their approach to ontology and doing theory suggests a constructive way of “mapping” a variety of projects against the background of a virtual whole that connects all projects promoting progressive change as well as individual and collective projects invested in living “good” (as in ethical) lives. This ability to provide a framework loose enough not to exclude disparate projects, and yet coherent enough to allow us to connect various kinds of progressive projects without assimilating those projects to specific theoretical paradigms, may provide impetus for the kind of joyous hybrid connections Rosi Braidotti calls for in her inspiring book, Transpositions (Braidotti 2006). Although it is impossible for any given path to affirm everyone equally, acknowledging the mutual implication of our unfolding projects as well as creatively thinking in terms of the larger wholes connecting us could help us find new solutions to how to live and work toward collective solutions.

The key motif of Deleuze and Guattari's thinking that I pursue as the unifying theme of this book is the provocative instigation to conceive our human living from the perspective of immersion in a durational whole made up of heterogeneous durations that includes nonhuman as well as human processes that are always unfolding toward an unpredictable future. Because my own trajectory is primarily informed by feminism, I draw on feminist issues and examples to illuminate the viability of Deleuze and Guattari's approach for the practical dilemmas of daily life. Although Deleuze and Guattari's work can be applied to a wide range of problems from a variety of social locations and perspectives, using concrete examples to exemplify my reading, I hope, shows how timely and relevant their approach can be for the pragmatic problems we face as human beings struggling to live ethical lives.

Bergson's critique of representational intelligence and his conception of intuition, as well as his critique of the conventional opposition of the possible and the real and his conception of an alternative opposition between the virtual and the actual, are important influences in the work of Deleuze as well as the work of Deleuze and Guattari. According to Bergson, representational intelligence, for practical reasons, conceives time in terms of static states and thus overlooks the durational becoming in which we are immersed.⁴ Human beings have the capacity to pull back from conventional representations of life and habitual patterns of living in order to intuit some of the durational becoming of which we are a part. This ability to widen the gap between perception and action (rather than repeating automatic responses to what we perceive) allows us to attune ourselves to the incipient tendencies that are an important aspect of duration. This can in turn allow a creative response to life's problems attuned to the specificity of particular times and places. Such attunement entails attending to not simply reality as it manifests (the actual), but to the intensities insisting in that reality (the virtual) that given certain actions could lead to the unfolding of new ways of living. In the next section, I elaborate on these ideas and the conception of time as becoming that goes with them. In the last section of this chapter, these ideas are explored in the context of the view of philosophical thinking put forth in Deleuze and Guattari's book, What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, hereafter abbreviated as WP). The latter work suggests that philosophical thinking is an intervention in habitual patterns of thinking and living rather than a representation of the world that is more or less correct. I consider how this perspective affects our conception of, in particular, progressive forms of thinking like that of feminism. This introduction to a different way of thinking about what theory can do for us sets the tone for the remaining chapters of this book; it invites my reader to take the views expressed here not as claims that better express the “truth” about what it means to be a human being or how we should live our lives, but as interventions in my own flow of life, as well as the flows of my reader, that might precipitate revitalizing flows of meaning and action as well as more skillful, joyful composition of the relations of life.

In chapter 2, I consider the question of what it is to be human. The latter topic has been of ongoing importance to feminism in its struggle to claim full humanity for women as well as other marginalized subjects. Considering how Deleuze and Guattari account for who we are and how we got here will suggest new perspectives on who we could become and how we might move forward. I lay out Deleuze and Guattari's characterization of three different social regimes in order to give a sense of how a shifting field of social practices (always in interaction with the other processes—both human and nonhuman—through which humanity becomes) provides the background for variations in human subjectivity and, in particular, to suggest that contemporary forms of subjectivity take a distinctive, oedipal form, that could mutate into forms of subjectivity more receptive to affirming variations in subjectivity in its differing divergence from already lived forms of human existence. Deleuze and Guattari posit a notion of faciality machines that require binary designations of relatively static identities organized with respect to a majoritarian subject. If majoritarian forms of subjectivity require ranking human beings in ways that privilege some by denigrating others, then welcoming and supporting new forms of subjectivity that can affirm variations in human living could, from a perspective informed by an immanent ethics, enable more skillful compositions of humanity and the world.⁵

In chapter 3, I consider some examples of feminist cartographies that converge in suggestive ways with the Deleuze–Guattarian perspective developed in the first and second chapters. Although none of these examples reference Deleuze and Guattari's work, they resonate in illuminating ways with my reading of Deleuze and Guattari's conception of subjectivity in light of the specific problem of marginalized forms of subjectivity. I consider an example of transgender confusion (the case of David Reimer) to illustrate the lived dissonance faciality machines can produce, and I appeal to Linda Alcoff's conception of identity (despite the non-Deleuze–Guattarian cast of her work) as an orientation lived through collective patterns of corporeal and symbolic activity that she derives from her reading of phenomenology in order to elaborate a notion of identity that I argue would be in keeping with Deleuze and Guattari's conception of subjectivity (despite their resistance to more traditional notions of identity). This reconception of identity suggests that it is (or could be) a practice of naming lived orientations that intensifies some incipient meanings and tendencies of one's situation rather than others with important effects on individual and collective becoming. Although Deleuze and Guattari are at times critical of phenomenology, far from denying a phenomenologically inspired notion of lived orientation, their view conceives of such orientations as emergent effects of larger processes and implies that the corporeal and semiotic practices that require positioning oneself and others according to the binary identities of multiple faciality machines are but one aspect of the myriad ways through which we ground our subjectivity.

A conception of lived orientations as emerging from repeating patterns suggests multiple ways in which we as self-organizing subjects-in-process with relative autonomy from the becomings in which we are immersed could intervene in our individual and collective becomings in productive ways. In particular, the Deleuze–Guattarian perspective I develop throughout this book suggests that although we may not have the kind of control in our lives a traditional conception of the subject as an autonomous, rational individual might imply, there are more and less skillful ways of navigating the flows of living. Attending to the nuances of our perceptions, actions, and thoughts, as well as mapping our locations with respect to the global, political, and social flows of our varying durations, allows us to unfold the incipient tendencies of our present toward futures we can affirm. In chapter 4, I address some strategies in gaining and enacting what we might call the embodied knowledge of lived orientations in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's notions of constructing plateaus or bodies without organs, as well as in terms of thought forms like philosophy and art. Deleuze and Guattari's notion of constructing a body without organs suggests pragmatic ways of attuning oneself to the creative potential of the present as well as unfolding forms of subjectivity more adept at navigating the differentiating forces of durational time. I consider some examples of forms of thought like philosophy and art that, in distinctive ways, can contribute support to such experiments, including the concept of becoming-woman that I read as a strategy for evading the binary machines of faciality.

In chapter 5, I elaborate a Deleuzian ethics through readings of Deleuze's interpretations of the naturalist ethics and politics of Spinoza and Nietzsche premised on what bodies can do and become rather than overarching principles; I argue that Deleuze's notion of being “worthy of the event” involves attuning ourselves to the multiple durations of our lives in ways that allow us to skillfully unfold the creative possibilities of the multiple assemblages of which we form a part rather than fixate on our representations of life. I consider Dorothy Allison's novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, as an example of how such an ethics might work (Allison 1992). Allison's aesthetic rendering of the complicated situation of Bone, the traumatized girl who is the novel's protagonist, on my reading, manifests how Bone is part of a larger story whose participants co-participate in the unfolding of a collective life, and suggests that an ethical response demands attunement to the actualities and implicit tendencies of the multiple durations making up her life in all their reciprocal give-and-take in order to find the solution to her situation that would best support the flourishing of the assemblages of which she forms a part. I end this chapter by expressing some reservations with Deleuze and Guattari's perhaps overly romantic emphasis on the revolutionary novelty of the nomadic subject, and advocate a reading of their work that supports fledgling subjects struggling to emerge.

In chapter 6, I start by considering Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd's conception of Spinozist ethology to elaborate Deleuze and Guattari's immanent ethics in the context of a politics. Gatens and Lloyd's reading of Spinoza suggests that embodied knowledge derived through our encounters with others circulates in the narratives communities create; a social imaginary is the open and evolving set of imaginaries in which the identities of a community's members are negotiated and renegotiated. Gatens and Lloyd's conception of ethology suggests that a rational approach to life emerges when the embodied knowledge developed in experimental encounters and circulated in the social imaginary becomes ever more attuned to how shifting compositions of powers of affecting and being affected can be harmonized. Such an ethology amounts to mapping events in terms of the singularities of specific durations rather than with respect to universals and so, I argue, requires subjects able to intuit duration and become with time, as well as cultural practices that encourage embodied forms of knowing. I then elaborate how the shifts in thinking regarding time, the human, subjectivity, and identity explored in earlier chapters, might be summarized in a conception of subjectivity able to support such forms of immanent ethics and politics, and I end by re-examining the role of theory in promoting such forms of subjectivity.

My goal throughout this book is to render the Deleuze–Guattarian perspective as clearly as possible with an eye to the implications such a shift in perspective might have for forms of thought such as feminism that strive to rethink what it means to be human in light of ethical and political concerns. My hope is that some of the excitement I feel as I read Deleuze and Guattari's work will come through to my readers and perhaps inspire some unexpected solutions to current impasses in theory and practice in various locations invested in promoting the flourishing of all of humanity in harmony with the world that sustains us.

Intuition and the Durational Whole

The key difference between Deleuze and Guattari's ontology and a more traditional one can be read as a response to Bergson's claim that traditional ontology spatializes time. To understand a state of affairs in terms of what is spatially present in extended space without taking into account the dynamic unfolding of time insisting in that state of affairs is to miss an important part of our present reality, one that we need to take into account if we are to engage in skillful living. Instead of understanding each state of affairs as a static state from which the next state of affairs can be deduced, we need to understand each state of affairs not only in terms of what is overtly manifest in them, but in terms of implicit tendencies toward unfolding capacities of the bodies involved. These tendencies may or may not actually materialize, but they nevertheless have dynamic impact on what occurs.

Giovanna Borradori, in a helpful commentary, explains that according to Bergson, describing events in terms of properties or causal effects requires extracting them from becoming. Entities are “in” time, but when viewed as becoming “through” time they are “phases of becoming.” Describing events in terms of properties or causal effects requires extracting them from becoming. Extracting an event from becoming reduces it to a present state “where the changing character of time is ontologically deactivated. This way, the event is rendered a steady, self-contained presence that allows us to think of it ‘as if’ it were located in space” (Borradori 2001, 5). Time taken as a durational whole cannot be divided into homogeneous units. In order to measure time, we need “to ontologically deactivate the passing character, or durational feature of time, and spatialize it” (ibid.). Bodies are comprised of tendencies, some of which are expressed in a specific duration. What is expressed depends on how tendencies differ from one another. A tree comprised of tendencies toward bending and falling will finally express falling and crashing to the ground if enough tendencies intensifying those tendencies (saturated ground, strong wind) also are expressed. It is the difference among tendencies (a tendency to absorb water vs. a tendency to become saturated) where certain tendencies manifest rather than others that gives expression, during a specific time, to a specific overt thing we can perceive (by spatializing time) in terms of properties and causes. If we understand phenomena in terms of overt causes with determinable effects and the manifest properties of individual bodies, we miss the interplay of imperceptible tendencies that are a part of the condition of any actual event. For Deleuze and Guattari, a thing “is the expression of a tendency before being the effect of a cause” (Deleuze 1999, 45, quoted in Borradori 2001, 7). This way of looking at things suggests that we interpret phenomena as the “dynamic expression of forces” (Borradori 2001, 10). Thus, on Deleuze and Guattari's view, the world becomes “a multiplicity of virtual tendencies, in a constant state of becoming” rather than a set of static things (14). The virtual is Deleuze and Guattari's term for this real, if imperceptible, aspect of the dynamic flow of time.

On Deleuze and Guattari's (Bergsonian) view, to think time in terms of what unfolds moment by moment in a Newtonian conception of extended space strips it of its dynamic intensity. Time as it is lived is rather a durational whole that shifts qualitatively as it unfolds in specific forms of reality, shifting further tendencies in becoming in the process. If we stabilize out of the flux of time an understanding of space in terms of stable objects and fixed relations, it is because this allows us to live. Instead of living in a constant flow of the continuously new, we perceive the world in terms of our memories of the past; we perceive not this completely new moment of living tree, but a tree that extends past tree-memories. Instead of patterns of becoming, we perceive constant forms that remain the same over time. We then extract from these forms an extended space to which we attach a spatialized time. Thus, although our lives are always unfolding in dynamic temporalities, we take the constant forms that are the effects of relatively “territorialized” routines of life—habitually repeated patterns of inorganic, organic, semiotic, cultural, and social forms of life—to be the reality.

It has been of great practical advantage to abstract things from the flux of becoming in order to reduce them to entities stripped of their virtual intensities about which we can then generalize across contexts. This allows us to communicate as well as apply lessons learned in one situation to other situations. As Bergson points out, this ability to abstract the features of a thing or situation that are of practical interest to us has allowed us to learn and adapt to changing situations with more creativity and flexibility (Bergson 1998, 140–45). Whereas living creatures ruled entirely by instincts automatically respond to stimuli from a limited repertoire of behavior, sentient creatures have varying abilities in opening a gap between perception and action that introduces a range of choices. The more complicated an organism, the more sophisticated its central nervous system, the more networks of synapses of its brain, the more the gap between perception and action can be widened. Linear stimulus–response patterns become complicated by the superposition of past responses and memories. Due to the complicated delay set up by our nervous system as well as cultural systems of meaning, we are not limited to merely instinctual reactions; the way we react is mediated via the neuronal paths of our brains and the networks of meaning of our culture.

According to Bergson, the more instinctual an organism is, the more its responses will be in keeping with repeatable patterns of the past; perception will be selective, taking from a situation what the organism needs to know in order to launch the response from a limited repertoire of responses that seems most appropriate. Intelligent perception entails a selection of sensation in keeping with the needs of the body. Life is a combination of tendencies and states—the implicit forces that could push it to a novel outcome, as well as the states of affairs that are already fully manifest—but we perceive that part of the present that can be compared to representations of the past that allow us to repeat successful patterns established on the basis of past experience. As organisms with complicated nervous systems, we have what B...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 2: A GENEALOGY OF (IN)HUMAN EXISTENCE
• Chapter 3: FEMINIST CARTOGRAPHIES AND MINORITARIAN SUBJECTIVITY
• Chapter 4: BODIES, TIME, AND INTUITION
• Chapter 5: ETHICS, TRAUMA, AND COUNTER-MEMORY
• Chapter 6: POLITICS, SUBJECTIVITY, AND THEORY
• Notes
• References