To become revolutionist and political creations - Gilles Deleuze

source: http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Le-devenir-revolutionnaire-et-les.html

To become revolutionist and political creations
Maintenance carried out by Toni Negri by Gilles Deleuze

In your intellectual life the problem of the policy seems to have been always present. On a side, the participation in the movements (prisons, homosexual, Italian autonomy, Palestinians), other, the constant problematization of the institutions are followed and intermingle in your work, since the book on Hume until that on Foucault. From which is it born this continuous approach with the question from the policy and how succeeds in being maintained always there, with the wire of your work? Why the movement-institutions ratio is always problematic?

What interested me, they was collective creations rather than the representations. In the “institutions”, there is a whole movement which is distinguished at the same time from the laws, and the contracts. What I found at Hume, it was a very creative design of the institution and Right. In the beginning I was interested more in the Right than to the policy. What I liked even at Masoch and Sade, it was their design completely twisted of the contract according to Masoch, of the institution according to Sade, brought back to sexuality. Today still, the work of François Ewald to restore a philosophy of the Right seems essential to me. What interests me, it is the law neither the laws (one is an empty concept, the others, obliging concepts), nor even the Right or the rights, it is jurisprudence. It is the jurisprudence which is really creative of right: it would be necessary that it does not remain not entrusted to the judges. One already thinks of establishing the right of modern biology: but all, in modern biology and the new situations which it creates, the new events which it makes possible, is business of jurisprudence. It is not a committee of wise, moral and pseudo-qualified, which one needs, but of groups of users. It is there that one passes from the right to the policy. A kind of passage to the policy, I did it for my account, with May 68, as I contacted precise problems, thanks to Guattari, thanks to Foucault, thanks to Elie Sambar. The Anti-Oedipus was entire a political book of philosophy.

You felt the events of 68 as being the triumph of Inopportune, the realization of the contreeffectuation. Already in the years before 68, in work on Nietzsche, just as a little later, in Sacher Masoch, the policy is reconquered on your premise like possibility, event, singularity. There are short-circuits which open the present on the future. And which modifies, therefore, same institutions? But after 68, your evaluation seems to be moderated: the wandering thought always arises, in time, in the form of the instantaneous against-execution; in space, only one “to become minority is universal”. But what is this thus that this universality of the inopportune one?

It is that, more and more, I was sensitive to a possible distinction between becoming it and history. It is Nietzsche which said that nothing important is done without a “cloud not-history”. It is not an opposition between the eternal and the history, nor between contemplation and the action: Nietzsche speaks about what is done, about the event even or becoming. What the history seizes of the event, it is its execution in states of affairs, but the event in its becoming escapes the history. The history is not the experimentation, it is only the whole of the almost negative conditions which make possible the experimentation of something which escapes the history. Without the history the experimentation would remain unspecified, inconditionnée, but the experimentation is not historical. In a large book of philosophy, Clio, Péguy explained that there are two manners of considering the event, one which consist in passing along the event, to collect of it the execution in the history, conditioning and rotting in the history, but the other to go up the event, to settle in him as in becoming, at the same time to renovate and age in him all, to pass by all its components or singularities. To become is not history; the history indicates only the whole of the however recent conditions are, which one is diverted “to become”, i.e. to create something again. It is exactly what Nietzsche calls the Inopportune one. May 68 was the demonstration, the irruption to become in a pure state. Today the fashion is to denounce the horrors of the revolution. It is not even new, all the English romanticism is full with a reflexion today on Cromwell very similar to that on Stalin. It is said that the revolutions have a bad future. But one does not cease mixing two things, the future of the revolutions in the history and the become-revolutionist of people. They are not even same people in both cases. The only chance of the men is in becoming to it revolutionist, who can only entreat shame, or answering the intolerable one.

It seems to me that Thousand Plates, that I regard as one of the philosophical philosopher's stones of this century, is also a catalogue of irresolute problems, especially in the field of political philosophy. The couples conflict process-project, singularity-subject, composition-organization, creepage distances, devices and strategies, microphone-macro, etc - all that, not only remain always open but are unceasingly réouvert, with an amazing theoretical will and a violence which points out the tone of the heresies. I do not have anything against such a subversion, quite to the contrary… But sometimes it seems me to hear a tragic note, where one does not know where brings the “machine of war”.

I am touched of what you me known as. I believe that Felix Guattari and me, we remained Marxist, in two different ways perhaps, but both. It is that we do not believe in a political philosophy which would not be centered on the analysis of capitalism and its developments. What interests us more at Marx, it is the analysis of capitalism as system immanent which does not cease pushing back its own limits, and which always finds them on an increased scale, because the limit, it is the Capital itself. Thousand Plates indicates many directions including here the three principal ones: initially a company seems to us to be defined less by its contradictions that by its creepage distances, she flees of everywhere, and it is very interesting to try to follow to such or such moment the creepage distances which take shape. That is to say the example of Europe today: the Western politicians gave each other much evil to do it, the technocrats, much of evil to standardize modes and payments, but on the one hand what is likely to surprise, in fact the explosions can be made in the young people, at the women, according to the simple widening of the limits (that is not “technocratisable”), and on the other hand it is rather merry to think that this Europe is already completely exceeded before to have started, exceeded by the movements which come from the East. They are serious creepage distances. There is another direction in Thousand Plates, which does not only any more consist in considering the creepage distances rather than contradictions, but the minorities rather than the classes. Finally a third direction, which consists in seeking a statute of the “Machines of war”, which would not be defined at all by the war, but by a certain manner of occupying, to fill the space time, or to invent new space times: revolutionary movements (one does not consider sufficiently for example how the PLO had to invent a space time in the Arab world), but also the movements of art are such machines of war. You known as that all that is not without a tragic tonality, or melancholic person. I believe to see why. I was very struck by all the pages of Primo Levi where he explains why the Nazi camps introduced in us “shame to be a man”. Not, he says, that we all are responsible for the Nazism, as one would like to make us believe it, but we were soiled by him: even the survivors of the camps had to pass from the compromises, would be this to only survive. Shame that there were men to be Nazis, shame not to have been able nor not known to prevent it, shame to have passed from the compromises, it is all that Primo Levi calls the “grey area”. And shame to be a man, it also arrives that we test it in simply ridiculous circumstances: in front of a too great vulgarity to think, in front of a variety programme, the speech of a minister, remarks of jovial fellow. It is one of the most powerful reasons for philosophy, which in fact inevitably a political philosophy. In capitalism, there is only one thing which is universal, it is the market. There is no universal State, precisely because there is a universal market whose States are hearths, Stock Exchanges. However it is not any more universalizing, homogenizing, it is a fantastic manufacture of richness and misery. There is no democratic State which is not compromised to the heart in this manufacture of human misery. Shame, it is that we do not have any sure means to preserve, and with more strong reason to make raise the evolutions, including in ourselves. How a group will turn, how it will fall down in the history, it is what imposes perpetual “a concern”. We do not lay out more than one image of the proletarian of which it would be enough to become aware.

How to become to it minority can it be powerful? How resistance can become an insurrection? By reading you, I am always in the doubt in connection with the answers to be given to such questions, even if, in your works, I always find the impulse which obliges me to reformulate theoretically and practically such questions. And yet, when I read your pages on the common imagination or concepts at Spinoza, or when I am in Image-Time your description on the composition of the revolutionary cinema in the Third World countries, and that I seized with you the passage of the image to fabulation, the political praxis, I have almost the impression to have found an answer… Or am I mistaken? Does there thus exist a mode so that the resistance of oppressed can become effective and intolerable the definitively unobtrusive one? Does there exist a mode so that mass of singularities and atoms which we all are can be presented in the form of a constituent capacity, or on the contrary, must we accept the legal paradox according to which the constituting capacity can be defined only by the capacity made up?

The minorities and the majorities are not characterized by the number. A minority can be more numerous than a majority. What defines the majority, it is a model with which it is necessary to be in conformity: for example average European adult male living cities… While a minority does not have a model, it is to become, a process. One can say that the majority, it is Nobody. Everyone, under an aspect or another, is taken in becoming minority which would involve it in unknown ways if it decided to follow it. When a minority creates for itself models, it is because she wants to become majority, and it is undoubtedly inevitable for its survival or its safety (for example to have a State, to be recognized, impose its rights). But its power comes from what it knew to create, and which will pass more or less in the model, without depending on it. The people, it is always a creative minority, and which remains it, even when it conquers a majority: the two things can coexist because they are not lived on the same plan. The largest artists (at all of the populist artists) call upon people, and note that “the people miss”: Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Klee, Berg. With the cinema, Straub. The artist can only call upon people, it needs some with deepest for his company, it does not have to create it and cannot it. Art, it is what resists: it resists death, the constraint, the infamy, shame. But can't the people deal with Article Comment people is created, in which abominable sufferings? When people are created, it is by its own means, but so as to join something of art (Garel says that the museum of Louvre, also, contains an abominable sum of suffering to him), or so that art joins what it missed. The Utopia is not a good concept: there is rather a “fabulation” common to the people and for Article It would be necessary to take again the concept bergsonnienne of fabulation to give him a political direction.

In your book on Foucault and then also in the televisual interview with the INA, you propose to look further into the study of three practices of the capacity - the Sovereign, the Disciplinary one - and especially that of Control on the “communication” which today is becoming hegemonic. On a side this last scenario returns to highest perfection of the domination which touches also the word and imagination, but of the other, never as much as today, all the men, all the minorities, all the singularities are potentially able to take again the word, and with it, more an high degree of freedom. In the Utopia marxienne of the “Grundrisse”, Communism precisely configures like a transverse organization free individuals, on a technical basis which guarantees the conditions of them. Is Communism still thinkable? In is the company of the communication, perhaps less utopian than yesterday?

It is certain which we enter companies of “control”, which are not exactly any more disciplinary. Foucault is often regarded as the thinker of the companies of discipline, and their principal technique, enfermement (not only the hospital and the prison, but the school, the factory, the barracks). But in fact, it is one of the first to say that the disciplinary companies, it is what we are leaving, which we are not already any more. We enter holding companies, which function no longer by enfermement, but continuous assessment and instantaneous communication. Of course one does not cease speaking about prison, school, hospital: these institutions are in crisis. But if they are in crisis, it is precisely in rearguard actions. What is set up, with let us touch, they are new types of sanctions, education, care. The opened hospitals, the medical teams in residence, etc, already appeared for a long time. One can provide that education will be less and less a closed medium, being distinguished from professional environment as another closed medium, but that both will disappear with the profit from a terrible continuing education, a continuous assessment being exerted on the workman-high-school pupil or the cadreuniversitaire. One tries to make us accept a reform of the school, whereas it is a liquidation. In a mode of control, one in forever finished with nothing. Yourself, a long time ago that you analyzed a change of work in Italy, with forms of temporary work, in residence, which were confirmed since (and of new forms of circulation and distribution of the products). With each type of company, obviously, one can make correspond a type of machine the simple or dynamic machines for the companies of sovereignty, the machines energy for the disciplines, cybernetics and the computers for the holding companies. But the machines do not explain anything, it is necessary to analyze the collective fittings of which the machines are only one part. Vis-a-vis the nearest forms of ceaseless control in opened medium, it may be that hardest enfermements appears to us to belong to a delicious and benevolent past. The research of the “universals of the communication” has what to make us tremble. It is true that, before even as the holding companies really organized themselves, the forms of delinquency or of resistance (two distinct cases) appear too. For example hackings or viruses of computers, which will replace the strikes and what one called at the XIXe century “sabotage” (the shoe in the machine). You ask whether the communication or holding companies will not cause forms of resistance able to give again chances with a Communism conceived like “transverse organization free individuals”. I do not know, perhaps. But it would not be insofar as the minorities could take again the word. Perhaps the word, the communication it is rotted. They are entirely penetrated by the money: not by accident, but by nature. One needs a diversion of the word. To create was always other thing that to communicate. The important thing, it will be perhaps to create vacuoles of not-communication, switches, to escape control.

In Foucault and the Fold, it seems that the processes of subjectivation are observed with more attention that in some of your other works. The subject is the limit of a continuous motion between an inside and an outside. Which political consequences this design of the subject does it have? If the subject cannot be solved in the externality of the citizenship, can it found this one in the power and the life? Can it make possible a militant pragmatic news, at the same time “pietas” for the world and very radical construction? Which policy to prolong in the history the splendour of the event and subjectivity? How to think a powerful community without base but, totality, but, as at Spinoza, absolute?

One can indeed speak about process of subjectivation when one considers the various ways in which the individuals or of the communities constitute themselves like subjects: such processes are worth only insofar as, when they are done, they escape at the same time from the knowledge made up and the dominant capacities. Even if thereafter they generate new capacities or pass by again in new knowledge. But, at the time, they have a rebellious spontaneousness well. There is not no return to the “subject”, i.e. with a gifted authority of duties, being able and knowing. Rather as process of subjectivation, one could speak as well about new types of event: events which are not explained by the states of affairs which cause them, or in which they fall down. They rise one moment, and it is this moment which is important, it is the chance that it is necessary to seize. Or one could speak simply about brain: it is the brain which is exactly this limit of a reversible continuous motion between an inside and an outside, this membrane between the two. New frayages cerebral, new manners of thinking are not explained by micrurgy, it is on the contrary the science which must endeavour to discover what there can have been well in the brain so that one starts to think of such or such manner. Subjectivation, event or brain, it seem to me that it is a little the same thing. To accept the world, it is what we miss more; we completely lost the world, one dispossessed us. To accept the world, it is as well to cause even small events which escape control, or to give birth to from new space times, even of reduced surface or volume. It is what you call “pietas”. It is on the level of each attempt that judge the capacity of resistance, or on the contrary the tender with a control. One needs at the same time creation and people.