The Utopian dimension of thought in Deleuze and Guattari.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Holland, Eugene W.
• Date: 01 January 2006

It is no small irony that two of the most remarkable recent renewals of utopian thinking would find inspiration in a version of universal history--the one propounded by Deleuze and Guattari in their first collaboration, Anti-Oedipus--that explicitly eschews any utopian program of its own. (1) 'Schizoanalysis as such,' Deleuze and Guattari insist, 'has no political program to propose'. (2) This is so because in their view it is illegitimate to assign the deterritorializing movement of history any goal whatsoever: the principle of hope in history is 'completing the process [of deterritorialization] and not arresting it, [neither by] making it turn about in the void, [nor by] assigning it a goal'. (3) How could such an apparently anti-utopian perspective have inspired such differing utopian visions as those of Hardt and Negri in Empire and of Edouard Glissant in Traite du Tout-Monde? Perhaps the greater irony, however, is that the more familiar and developed of these two utopian visions--that of Hardt and Negri--is at odds with what Deleuze and Guattari do say about utopianism as a mode of thought in their last collaboration, What is Philosophy? A comparison of Hardt and Negri with Deleuze and Guattari will reveal what is distinctive about the latters' conception and practice of utopian thought, especially in contrast with the perspective of that other great utopian marxist of the 20th century, Ernst Bloch. An important point of departure is the distinction between what can be called 'utopianism as a process' and utopia as a fixed 'product': that is, the various utopianisms under consideration here all involve not the elaboration of an ideal blueprint for a perfect society (such as those of Thomas More, Charles Fourier, et al.), but rather the identification of real historical forces or trends that are judged likely to ameliorate rather than aggravate the human condition. (4) This important distinction finds strong confirmation and something in the way of a historical explanation in Deleuze and Guattari's reflections on the relation between the utopian dimension of thought and what in Anti-Oedipus they call universal history.

I

Perhaps the first thing to be said about this version of universal history, which Deleuze and Guattari derive in part from Marx, is that it is quite unlike--perhaps even diametrically opposed to-the better known Hegelian variety. Deleuze and Guattari in fact call it an 'ironic' universal history, for three interrelated reasons: it is retrospective, singular and critical. (5) It is retrospective in that, just as the anatomy of the human being offers the key to the anatomy of the ape, schizophrenia and the deterritorialized socius of capital arise only at the end of history. (6) But this is important because of the singularity of capitalist society: it is not some hidden similarity between capitalism and previous social forms that makes capitalism universal, but rather what Marx (in the Grundrisse) calls the 'essential difference' between it and the others. (7) Nor did market capitalism evolve from pre-capitalist markets out of historical necessity: Marx insists instead on the role of 'chance' in the singular emergence of capitalism. (8) Finally, capitalism offers the key to universal history because with capitalism society can become self-critical: labour as abstract subjective essence, as productive activity in general, becomes a reality only under capitalism, and thus makes the critique of capitalist and all other forms of exploitation possible. In just the same way, Deleuze and Guattari argue, Freud's discovery of the abstract subjective essence of desire makes the critique of Oedipus and all other forms of repression possible. It would be possible to take this argument one step further and suggest that the key to the universality of the capitalist market or to capitalist universal history is ultimately its promotion of difference: the universal is not some feature or principle shared with or common to all human societies, it is difference itself.

We have become familiar with one version of this argument from feminists such as Irigaray and Spivak: faced (particularly in reading Hegel or Lacan) with the asymmetry between man's and woman's participation in the universal, the solution is to proclaim sexual difference itself to be the true universal. (9) What is truly human is not sharing a set of traits--a set that inevitably appears skewed or unfair as soon as the differences between men and women are taken into account--but rather the very necessity of choosing between being man and being woman. (10) For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the universal is found not in difference as binary opposition--man /woman--but in difference itself: differences in the plural; multiple differences; or difference in multiplicity. If capitalism makes history universal, this is because it promotes multiple differences--or in other words, because the capitalist market operates as a difference-engine. (11) For Marx, the key human universal was production: the species-being of humanity was defined in terms of its ever-growing ability to produce its own means of life rather than simply consume what nature offered. For Deleuze and Guattari, the key universal is not just production (not even in the very broad sense they grant that term in Anti-Oedipus (12)), but specifically the production of difference.

Capitalism is not the only difference-engine, however: evolution is another, and expression is yet another. In each case there exists an interplay of differentiation and consolidation. (13) In the case of life, random genetic mutation multiplies differences, from which natural selection then consolidates (or 'contracts') organs and species. In the case of expression, what Peirce calls 'infinite semiosis' generates differential relations among signifiers and signifieds, which are then consolidated or captured in the sign-function by sedimented habit, codification, and representation. (14) In the case of the market, the circulation of commodities generates a vast network of differential relations, from which private capital then captures surplus-value. Of course, the relations among these three difference-engines are complex, but they are all part of one universe; as Deleuze and Guattari put it in Anti-Oedipus, 'nature=history=industry'. (15)

One feature distinguishing these three difference-engines is their relative speed. Each one represents, as it were, a quantum leap in the speed of differentiation: evolution differentiates somewhat faster than geology; cultural evolution or history differentiates far faster than biological evolution; and industrial production or capitalist history accelerates differentiation faster yet. Against the backdrop provided by the first of these engines (biology), Deleuze and Guattari are most interested in the ongoing clash between the more recent two: semiosis and the market. The argument of Anti-Oedipus is that under capitalism, the market prevails: deterritorialization and the decoding that accompanies it subordinate Meaning to the abstract calculus of market exchange. But even with the predominance of the market, capitalism for Deleuze and Guattari remains crucially ambivalent. On the one hand, the market continually differentiates and diversifies--constantly revolutionizing the means of production and consumption, as Marx put it, and constantly extending the division of labour and the socialization of production; but on the other hand, capital also continually centralizes, consolidating surplus accumulation in fewer and fewer private hands. Following the analyses of Fernand Braudel and presupposing (unlike Marx) the absolute predominance of finance capital over industrial capital, Deleuze and Guattari thus distinguish the immanent and synthetic dynamic of the market itself from the quasi-transcendent extractive operations of capital. (16)

The market fosters an increasingly differentiated network of social relations by expanding the socialization of production along with the division of labour, while capital extracts its surplus from the differential flows enabled by this network, by means of exploitation and the never-ending repayment of an infinite debt. (17) In this light, the erstwhile subordination of civil society and the market to the transcendent State is no longer paramount: the immanent constitution of differentiated productive social relations and the quasi-transcendent command and expropriation of those relations both take place within the economic sphere; the State, in other words, has been subordinated to capital and now functions merely to manage or regulate the network of flows in the service of private accumulation (hence its 'quasi-transcendent' rather than simply transcendent status). So even though the difference-engine of capital fails to fully realize universal history, it nonetheless makes universality possible--puts it on the historical agenda. The market inaugurates the utopian process of multiplying related difference and subverting all representation of the Same--even while capital and its tool, the State, operate to recapture difference in order to extract and accumulate surplus, consolidate power and enforce repayment of that infinite debt.

This preference for the utopian potential of the market vis-a-vis that of the state finds clear expression in the work of Edouard Glissant, whose affinity for Deleuze and Guattari (and in particular their concept of the rhizome) is well known. (18) One of the most striking features of his sketch of a utopian vision for the Caribbean island of Martinique is just how unconcerned--perhaps even somewhat disdainful--Glissant is about the juridical and constitutional matters associated with State politics, and particularly about the nature of the political ties between Caribbean islands and the French state. (19) In line with Deleuze and Guattari, his hopes clearly lie in the prospects for more equitable...