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Click the link above to download a PDF file of the Introduction to Edges of the State (University of Minnesota Press, 2019)
Part of the Forerunners series at University of Minnesota Press: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/edges-of-the-state
$7.95 paper (available now at the UMP link above)
ISBN 978-1-4529-6177-4
100 pages, 5 x 7, 2019
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Download Roanoke Feb 2019 (8M pdf file)
Synthesizes material from this course, from this paper, and from these posts.
(Opening disclaimer: I'm a rank amateur with regard to the sociology of squatting I mention below, but am going to be working on it, so I may come back to this note later in either shame or relief at my good luck in guessing at things.)
The preamble to the June 14-15 ENS colloquium "Margins of Europe: Borders Now" asks us to consider the margins of Europe in both geographical and social senses. The geographical sense would be national borders and the attempt to regulate flows of immigrants and refugees, and the social sense would be the manner in which national governments manage their populations by distinguishing citizens and non-citizens, and, within the latter class, the criteria for and treatment of those who are documented or undocumented residents.
I'd like to show here, by considering the work of James C Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) and Against the Grain (2017), that Europe's current struggles with its marginalities are examples of practices that are constitutive of the state as social form.
First, let us note that Scott, like Pierre Clastres (1989; 1994), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and others, reject any notion that the state evolves from pre-state conditions; rather, they insist, states are born by "capture," the violent imposition of the state form (taxes, obligatory labor, and rent on land) on non-state peoples. The state is then one social form among others, not the telos of sociality.
Such capture, however, provokes flight or marronage[1]. The first maroon societies are thus contemporaneous with the first states; as soon as there were states, people "ran for the hills." However, those fleeing the state could rarely simply ignore states, and would sometimes wish to return either to settle down, or to trade with the state. In fact, non-state people came to be necessary to states as supplying both non-human (raw materials) and human (enslaved people) commodities.
Thus, flight, while it is in one sense a mere consequence of capture, is in another sense co-constitutive of states; without those who flee, the state would have no one to trade with and would have to attempt raw material resource extraction itself. But this would dangerously stretch the power of the state to extract taxes, labor, and rent in its core. Much better then to manage the margins of the state qua geographical border.
At the same time as states dealt with those on their geographical borders, internal population management by means of "social marginality," was instantly set up, as states were in constant need of importing new members whose differences in political status (free vs slave; urban vs rural; and so on) needed to be regulated.
Overall, Scott's (2017) analyses of the first states fit Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) "Urstaat" thesis of the necessity of assembling state forms all at once in a mutually constitutive functioning unit: taxation, including the special apparatus of collectors, assessors, accountants; work gangs for agriculture or monumental architecture; scribes and their record-keeping apparatus; military specialists; standardized weights and measures (Sibertin-Blanc 2013; 2016; Smith 2018). These mutually constituting functions of the state are themselves as a whole in constant negotiations with their geographical and social margins with non-state peoples.[2]
Scott talks of the relation of state and non-state peoples as "symbionts" or "dark twins," a situation which sometimes produced a sort of shared sovereignty (or sharing of appropriated surplus), in which state and non-state peoples are competing for ability to extract surplus from captive primary production populations (2017, 243). Non-state control of trade routes enabled them to trade with states, and also to extort "taxation" of state-traders via "tolls" to allow passage, and piracy as predation on state trading. Non-state people did not always flee or repel the state; sometime they conquered it and become the new ruling class, and at other times they become mercenaries of state armies (250-251).
Scott ends Against the Grain by noting that while the "Golden Age" of non-state peoples lasted a long time, enslavement of other non-state people and sale of military service to states ultimately tipped the scales in favor of states, which now dominate the globe to a much greater extent than ever before (255-56). In the periphery, surveillance with GIS and drones; force projection with helicopters, and brutality with automatic weapons, can keep peasantry in line, and keep nonstate people confined to margins and ineffective in resisting resource extraction when desired.
Moving now to consider social marginality, contemporary biopolitical and neoliberal state administration can keep internal population management going in the core: the middle and working classes that are registered, tracked, and managed, some with full disciplinary force, others with the more "dividualizing" practices of "control" via databases and so on (Deleuze 1992).
In both these ways, then, the purely geographical and the "control" management of populations, fleeing the state by seeking territorial marginality is compromised to the point that for a full picture of marronage, we must make the turn to social marginality, and the ways non-documented people, or those dissatisfied citizens, go about trying to live as squatters, as inhabitants of "no go zones," as those who "go off the grid," and other forms of evading state rule within state territories.
For reasons of limited space and professional training, I won't continue except to ask that we consider one last turn of the screw. Scott agrees with Deleuze and Guattari on the need to conceptually separate the primary or originary violence of statification as capture and enslavement of non-state peoples, and the ordinary, everyday, or secondary violence of policing, tax collection, and labor coercion, which repeat and reinforce the originary violence by which tax and labor become obligations and attempts to evade them and / or to appropriate surplus by private means become criminalized.
Might it not be the case however, that in "no go zones" that non-state actors, often seen as "criminal gangs" by the state, engage in a sort of "shared sovereignty" by which they compete with states for appropriation of surplus ("protection" rather than taxes being a form of regularizing plunder, hence requiring punishment of those even gangs consider free-lancers infringing on "their people") and, sometimes, for provision of services (food handouts, housing via squatting or camping, and so on) from the marginal populations that states show little interest in managing other than by intermittent raids for deportation and camp dismantling purposes?
It’s an ambiguous situation, of course, as some (or indeed many) sans-papiers on the margins do indeed want to be recognized and documented. But I think that’s because they see that as the only way to a secure and stable life, given the way states render people on their (geographical and socials) margins precarious. But as precarity for the documented populations in the core grows, the difference in quality of life shrinks, and some documented folks themselves look for ways to avoid state capture by squatting and so on. I’m not an expert here by any means on squatting, but it does seem to be a positive, sought-after marginality.
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REFERENCES
Clastres, Pierre. 1989. Society Against the State. Trans. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein. New York: Zone Books.
Clastres, Pierre. 1994. Archaeology of Violence. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, Gilles. Postscript on Societies of Control. October, vol. 59: 3-7.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Protevi, John. 2015. Economies of Violence. http://www.protevi.com/john/ECONOMIES-28-March-2015.pdf
Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Scott, James C. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sibertin-Blanc, Guillaume. 2013. Politique et Etat chez Deleuze et Guattari. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
-----. State and Politics. New York: Semiotexte, 2016
Smith, Daniel. 2018. 7000BC: Apparatus of Capture. In Henry Somers-Hall, Jeffrey Bell, and James Williams, eds., A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 223-241.
[1] Here Scott disagrees with Thomas Nail, who reads early state marronage as expulsion rather than flight.
[2] None of this is to deny an economy of violence among non-state peoples (Protevi 2015), including 1) fighting against state agents; 2) internal state-preventing violence (capital punishment as "reverse dominance hierarchy" practices); and 3) predation on state economies in a) targeting trade routes for robbery or extortion of tolls, in b) raids which steal from the produce of valley agricultural producers, and c) enslavement practices, in which other hill peoples, or the valley population is itself the target, a commodity to be sold to competing states (Scott 2017: 219-256).
I'll be speaking at the "Inhuman Gaze" conference, to be held June 6-9 in Paris at the Centre Culturel Irlandais. I'm very grateful to the organizers, Anya Daly, James Jardine, Dermot Moran, Fred Cummins, and Brendan Kelly for the kind invitation.
You may click the following link to Download 27 May Inhuman Gaze (12MB) of my presentation, entitled "The Inhuman Gaze of the Berserker."
I think it will be in accord with the conference themes, which take off from this passage of Merleau-Ponty:
In the gaze …. ‘the other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact, the other’s gaze transforms me into an object and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s’.
As my previous work on berserkers was from a more or less 3rd person perspective, in keeping with the conference, the current work incorporates 1st and 2nd person perspectives alongside neuroscience in an attempt at a neurophenomenological treatment.
We stand in solidarity with Jason Stanley and Rebecca Kukla. They have unjustly been subjected to waves of online harassment produced by twisting their meaning and feeding their names to legions of online haters. Their support of colleagues, pointing out that civility should not excuse brutal and dangerous ideas, do not deserve the anonymous third-party abuse they have received. They are valued members of our profession and we sign to make public our defense of their right to live free of such attempts at intimidation.
Should you wish to co-sign this letter, you may do so by commenting below with your name and institutional affiliation. As with these signatories, affiliations are given for identification purposes only.
Eric Brown, Philosophy, Washington University, St Louis
Taylor Carman, Philosophy, Barnard College, Columbia University
Jon Cogburn, Philosophy, Louisiana State University
John Collins, Philosophy, Columbia University
Keith DeRose, Philosophy, Yale University
John Drabinski, Black Studies, Amherst College
Richard Drayton, History, Kings College London
Tom Eyers, Philosophy, Duquesne University
Branden Fitelson, Philosophy, Northeastern University
Leigh M Johnson, Philosophy, Christian Brothers University
Ed Kazarian, Philosophy, Rowan University
Jonathan Kramnick, English, Yale University
Sally Haslanger, Philosophy, MIT
Bonnie Honig, Political Science, Brown University
Bryce Huebner, Philosophy, Georgetown University
Chad Kautzer, Philosophy, Lehigh University
Mark Lance, Philosophy, Georgetown University
Utz McKnight, Political Science, University of Alabama
Joshua Miller, Criminal Justice, University of Baltimore
Donna Murch, History, Rutgers University
Kathryn Norlock, Philosophy, Trent University
Kathryn Pogin, Philosophy, Northwestern University
John Protevi, French Studies and Philosophy, Louisiana State University
Carl B Sachs, Philosophy, Marymount University, Virginia
Eric Schliesser, Political Science, University of Amsterdam
John Schwenkler, Philosophy, Florida State University
David Livingston Smith, Philosophy, University of New England
Mark Steen, Philosophy, Boğaziçi University
Lynne Tirrell, Philosophy, University of Massachusetts at Boston
Adriel Trott, Philosophy, Wabash College
Eric Winsberg, Philosophy, University of South Florida
Let's distinguish doxxing from signal-boosting, as the RC people would like us to do. Doxxing is two-fold: 1) revealing the real identity of someone using an anonymous or pseudonymous screen name, or 2) making public what is private. Signal-boosting is taking what was public in a small sphere and broadcasting it to a wider audience. Critics of RC claim they doxxed our colleagues, while the RC people say it was signal-boosting.
Let's accept it was signal-boosting, even though there is a strong argument to be made that some instances really are doxxing.
IN ANY EVENT, IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE SIGNAL-BOOSTING WAS ETHICALLY WRONG BECAUSE IT EXPOSED OUR COLLEAGUES TO STOCHASTIC HARASSMENT.
Stochastic harassment occurs when someone is exposed to mass vitriol by 3rd parties. The exposer initiates and mediates the harassment but does not directly conduct it. Having the RC story picked up by Dreher, Washington Times, and so on exposed our colleagues to vastly larger audiences and thereby predictably exposed them to harassment. (It seems plausible that the first move, from RC to Dreher, occurred via backchannel emails, though the idea that Dreher was simply a reader, while implausible, is not impossible.)
[EDITED] The real problem here is that our colleagues were falsely portrayed as hating traditional Christianity and Christians, when in fact the real target of their anger was 1) those who made a queer colleague's professional life miserable because of beliefs about sexual orientation similar to Swinburne's, and 2) people who were acting like cursing was less civil than Swinburne's disability claim.
WHEN YOU FALSELY PORTRAY JEWS AS HATERS OF CHRISTIANS IN 2016 AMERICA YOU EXPOSE THEM TO HARASSMENT AND INCREASED CHANCES OF PHYSICAL HARM.
Corollaries:
1) Swinburne suffered no comparable harm by having his "disability" claim cursed out on Facebook to that suffered by our colleagues. So RC can't be said to be evening the score.
2) Even if one were to say our colleagues acted imprudently by not taking sufficient notice of the danger of RC exposing them to stochastic harassment, that has no bearing on the ethical evaluation of RC's behavior.
This piece, entitled "Homophobia and the Limits of Scientific Philosophy" by Martin Pleitz is a fine paper on Swinburne's "disability" claim.
It's relevant, because if Swinburne had stuck to a claim about the immorality of homosexuality, none of this controversy would have happened. My sense of the sociology of the profession is that a great number of philosophers would a) have never heard of it, or b) if they did hear of it they would have shrugged it off as "dog bites man" level stuff, or c) they would have thought that there are resources within Christian moral philosophy to combat the claim, and if pressed, would have expressed solidarity with those using those resources to combat Swinburne's claim.
But, once it became known that "disability" language was being used, then anger and obscenity were among the reactions. FWIW, I'm in favor of obscenity directed at people using "disability" in the manner in which Swinburne uses it. But if in addition you want a cold dissection of the claim, Pleitz's paper is a good start:
Some excerpts from Pleitz's paper:
Abstract: To criticize Richard Swinburne’s recent argument for the thesis that homosexuality is a disability that should be prevented and cured, I show that it rests on implausible premises about the concepts of love and of disability, and that the endorsement of its conclusion would lead to grave consequences for homosexuals. I conclude that Swinburne in his argument against homosexuality has moved beyond the limits of scientific philosophy, and into the realm of homophobia.
1 Introduction
Richard Swinburne argues for the thesis that homosexuality is a disability that should be prevented and cured where possible (R 303ff.). The purpose of my talk is to criticize this argument against homosexuality. After giving you an outline of Swinburne’s argument, I will criticize its premises, concentrating on the concepts of love and disability (section 2). In a second step, I will outline some negative consequences for homosexuals living in Western societies that would emerge if the conclusion was widely accepted (section 3). After this discussion of homosexuality, I will change the stance and apply the sociological concept of homophobia to Swinburne’s text (section 4).
My presentation will be different in character from the other contributions at this conference. At Münstersche Vorlesungen, we usually try to offer internal and mostly constructive criticism to our guest philosopher. My criticism of Swinburne’s arguments will be neither internal nor constructive. I will rely on considerations external to Swinburne’s philosophy, e.g. on different concepts of love and disability and on the sociological concept of homophobia. And my criticism will not be constructive in spirit because I do not intend to help Swinburne improve his argument against homosexuality.
The ISA instructing us to trust the RSA, to believe its "official accounts," is nothing new (as below). John Drabinski asks us to consider whether there isn't now an additional imperative that the RSA must be loved.
In a number of discussions of the use of the robot-delivered bomb in Dallas to kill Micah Johnson, I've seen some folks say it was justified, because, in addition to the present risk posed by Johnson, "he had already killed 5 people." If this were part of the police calculation and not just online armchairing, then the police are not entitled to use that notion, as that is a fact to be established in a court of law. They are only allowed to assess present risk. The difference between those two sentences is the difference between a society of laws and a police state.
Nothing I'm saying here implies a yea or nay to the question whether the robot bomb was justified. There are specialists in risk assessment and ethical issues of law enforcement use of deadly force whose reports we can read and think about.
But the principle that the police must only consider present risk is what keeps us from condoning extra-judicial killings in which the police are judge, jury, and executioner. And insisting on that principle doesn't require special training; it's the very most basic duty of citizens to insist on it. It's what defines people as "citizens" in fact.
In addition, nothing I'm saying here implies that the USA is in fact "a society of laws," nor that there is a (non-color-marked) "we" who are "citizens." I'm purposely leaving open the possibility that in fact it has only ever been such a police state in a way that constituted whiteness as temporarily exempt from non-citizenship; I'm only making a conceptual distinction.
[UPDATE, following online discussion: 9:45pm, Sun 10 July: I think "reasonable suspicion he had killed 5 people" can be part of assessment of "present risk." I'm just objecting to the flatness of the statement of the armchair folks. (In this particular case, I'm not sure when the police shifted from the multiple sniper to the single shooter hypothesis, but even on the former, "reasonable suspicion the current shooter had been involved in an event with five deaths," can certainly be factored into the assessment of current state of mind of the shooter.}
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Further, on the question of what to think about the threshold breached by the robot-delivered bomb in the Johnson case, we could consider the case of Christopher Dorner.
There were rumors of drones being used to track Dorner, and others being prepped for killing him, but they ended up using a bulldozer to knock down the walls of the cabin he was in and then using "burners" (flash-bang tear-gas grenades known to cause fires) which burned down the cabin, causing him to kill himself to avoid being burnt alive.
Pull quotes from this LA Times piece:
Samuel Walker, emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska Omaha, was critical of the decision to use the "burner" tear gas canisters. "It's true, he was firing at them. But he was cornered. He was trapped. At that point, there was no rush in the sense that he was barricaded. The standard rules on barricade situations are that you can wait the person out," Walker said. "To use a known incendiary device raises some very serious questions in my mind."
Other law enforcement experts interviewed by The Times, however, said the move was justified. Even though SWAT officers were certain to have known a fire was a strong possibility, the use of the gas was reasonable in the face of the deadly threat Dorner presented, they said. Allowing the standoff to carry on into the night, they emphasized, would have added an unpredictable element to the drama that officials were smart to avoid."
What I like in this piece by John McWhorter about the Yale president's decision to keep the name of Calhoun College is the author's insistence that we can make judgments, draw lines, and discuss particular cases. We can thereby resist the all-too-prevalent leaping from concrete demands ("we must remove Calhoun's name on this residential college") to grand principles ("should we remove the names of all slave-holders from all buildings?").
That move, something to which I would say philosophers are especially prone, lends itself (I would say non-coincidentally) to facile slippery slopes ("what's next, remove the name of people who didn't educate their daughters properly?") and reductios ("so you're saying we should change the name of the capital city of the nation because Washington was a slave-holder?").
So, fellow philosophers, let's not be inveterate thread-jackers. Let's cultivate the capacity to stick to the topic and discuss concrete demands. If a significant movement arises that demands the removal of Washington's name from the capital city, we can discuss the merits of that demand. In the meantime, let's discuss Calhoun. (And if you're at Princeton, let's discuss Wilson.) There's nothing wrong with a series of concrete discussions.
And speaking of liberal pieties about "discussion" as ways to avoid, well, real discussion, it would be good to call the bluff of the "discussion" proponents. (The Yale president's ostensible reason for keeping Calhoun's name on the building was that it would foster "discussion.") Make Yale a 24/7/365 discussion zone about past, present, and future links between racism, slavery, reparations, student debt, public space and memorialization.
Let's have every single department be required to give a public presentation on their website about their discipline's perspectives -- in all its range of opinion and controversy -- on the above topics. From Anthropology and Architecture to Economics to Philosophy to Psychology to hell, Botany and Zoology (I would love to know what the lasting effects of the industrial plantation system had on the flora and fauna of the South, what effects the mills had on the Northeast, and so on).
The President wants "discussion"? Let's have him marshall the awesome resources of the Yale faculty and students and have a real "discussion."
LSU Distinguished Research Master Award 2015
April 20, 2016
John Protevi
Phyllis M Taylor Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philosophy
I am deeply honored to receive this award before so many friends and colleagues at the university that has played such a great role in my life. My thanks go to President Alexander, Provost Koubek, Vice President Valsaraj, Associate Vice President Beck, Associate Vice President Kousoulas, the members of the Council on Research, and to the staff members of ORED who have made this occasion possible. In addition, I’d like to thank Dean Haynie, Associate Deans Blanchard and Richardson, and the College of Humanities and Social Science staff, as well as my colleagues and the staff and students in the Department of French Studies and in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. And most certainly I want to acknowledge the love and support of my family, especially my wife, Kate Jensen, with whom I’ve shared an amazing 21 years.
It’s customary on these occasions, I think, to take a look back at one’s research trajectory. My current work brings together recent French philosophy, with recent developments in the life sciences and the cognitive sciences, all with an eye toward the concrete intersection of the social and the bodily that we live out everyday. I call that intersection “the body politic,” by which I mean to bring out the individual bodily aspect in addition to the usual collective civic aspect.
How I got there, though, requires a little storytelling. I was trained in what we call “continental philosophy,” that is, classical German and French philosophy from the 18th to 20th centuries (from Kant to Habermas on one side of the Rhine and from Rousseau to Foucault on the other). I was especially taught to connect those thinkers to the masters of the then-canonical Western tradition: Plato and Aristotle of course, but also Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume and so on.
So how did I get there, that is, to the study of “continental philosophy”?
I did it the way anyone enters a field, incorporating from peers and teachers (at Penn State, in my case) a set of beliefs / desires / tastes / emotional triggers, and so on, about what constitutes “good” or “bad” philosophy, or at least, “the sort of thing our people do.” I think this process is better described in terms of initiation or acculturation than it is in terms of rational deliberation. I certainly never had equal exposure to all philosophical traditions in my undergraduate training, and my decision to pursue continental philosophy training at the graduate level can’t really be said to be the result of rational deliberation. CP just felt right to me – I knew enough about it to know that it was a challenge I wanted to take up; the other main tradition in American universities, “analytic philosophy,” was largely unknown to me.
How I got to Penn State is no real mystery; I was a middle-class kid from suburban Philadelphia. I ended up doing a few majors before spending a few years in the late 70s studying Physical Education. I love sports, so the part about learning how to be a coach or gym teacher wasn’t painful, but I was aiming at a PhD in what they were just beginning to call “Kinesiology,” so what really turned me on was Anatomy, Physiology, Exercise Physiology, Biomechanics and so on. So when the PSU Phys Ed department wouldn’t let me arrange an internship in Cardiac Rehabilitation, I took a leave of absence to think things over.
And during that time, I picked up Plato’s Republic, which I remembered from an Intro to Philosophy course. I was hooked, especially by the treatment of the body: the erotic component of philosophical training; the training of the guardians; the discussion of desire, appetite, spirit, all of it. There’s always a danger of retrospectively creating a unified story that wasn’t really there all along, but I can’t help but feel a resonance between that first surge of interest in a philosophy of corporeal training and my current work on “bodies politic.”
But why did Plato and the connection of bodies and politics so appeal to me? I can’t say exactly but I don’t think it’s a simple case of outside-in conformity to an environment: there was something in me open to what the Republic was saying to me. The social circle of my family was Mid-Atlantic middle-class Irish-American “Kennedy liberals” (we had a picture of JFK and of Pope John the 23rd on our mantelpiece). Furthermore, I was 13 in 1968 and ever since that year of assassinations and riots, politics seemed a matter of life and death, a point that was reinforced when I registered for the Selective Service in 1973, when I turned 18. The Vietnam era draft was winding down, but they still had a lottery that year, even though they weren’t actually drafting people. My number was in the 300s, so I was safe, but I never lost the impression of “the system’s” claim on my body in a time of war. Looking back, I lived out a good example of “the body politic”: my body was a place where the American society was concretized such that the government had a claim on it.
Having taken up CP then at Penn State, my earliest serious work was on one of the classical metaphysical notions: time and its relation to inner experience and outer motion. My MA thesis was on Augustine’s notion of time in the Confessions, distentio animi (“stretching out of the soul”) and my PhD dissertation at Loyola University of Chicago was on Aristotle’s notion of time in the Physics, arithmos kineseos (“number of motion”). In both those works I triangulated my own reading with those of two important 20th century philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. The dissertation was revised and expanded in my first book, Time and Exteriority: Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida (Bucknell, 1994).
Now while the greatest personal turning point of my life was meeting my wife, Kate Jensen, here at LSU in 1994, an important intellectual turning point occurred the next year. A variety of accidents, and the good friendship of my graduate school colleague, Miguel de Beistegui, who nominated me for the award, resulted in me becoming Leverhulme Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Warwick in 1995-1996. There I underwent two intellectual transformations: I met some very interesting people and so read the contemporary French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995: that’s “contemporary” for philosophers!) for the first time. What I like about Deleuze is that he thought about what is called “complexity theory,” that is, the use of various mathematical elements to model dynamic systems involving feedback loops allowing unpredictable changes in behavior. And to understand that area, in a second transformation, I started reading some analytic philosophy of science and mathematics.
This was a big turning point. I had been vaguely dissatisfied with the way Heideggerians and Derrideans weren’t really that interested in science, and I wasn’t thrilled with Heidegger’s politics, to put it mildly. But I loved what they did with the history of philosophy. But suddenly here with Deleuze there was a chance to do science, politics, and the history of philosophy all together! This part of my career resulted in my second book, Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic, (Athlone, 2001) and my third, Deleuze and Geophilosophy (Edinburgh, 2004), co-authored with a professional geographer, Mark Bonta, an LSU PhD.
But there’s another biographical accident that has also shaped by career. One of my wife’s best friends is Amy Cohen, who is the widow of Francisco Varela. Through Amy I had the chance to meet Francisco twice, and even got to translate some of his work. It was reading Francisco’s work, and that of his collaborator Evan Thompson, that got me hooked on the enactive school of cognitive science (it takes the guidance of action by an organism as its paradigm of cognition, rather than the symbol manipulation of a computer). That turn to “enaction” heavily influenced by last two books, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minnesota, 2009) and Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (Minnesota, 2013).
I have two favorite essays from that time period, both of them case studies of particular “bodies politic,” one a narrow focus and one a wide angle one: on the Terri Schiavo case and on Hurricane Katrina, both written in a frenzy in 2005 as the events unfolded. With those pieces, I had the impression I could now “speak in my own voice,” in combining politics, science, and philosophy, but only by immersing myself in many different fields, from neuropathology to jurisprudence to meteorology to the history of slave revolts to ... Of course that breadth comes at the risk of superficiality, of cherry picking results that confirm that I wanted to say, of making connections and leaving the details to others, but those are risks I’m willing to assume, though at the cost of an intimate familiarity with Impostor Syndrome.
I mentioned that the Schiavo and Katrina pieces are case studies. I think case studies should be used more by philosophers, in addition to the thought experiments of which we are so fond -- brain transplants, brains-in-a-vat, zombies, and others. Case studies do not aim at identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for an essential distinction, as do thought experiments. Instead case studies reveal the outlines of concrete problems, which are the points of intersection of "multiplicities," a Deleuzean term of art which means a "problematic" field in which linked rates of change create conflicting pressures so that (1) any one move changes the conditions for future moves and (2) no one solution exhausts the potentials for future creatively different solutions. Deleuzean problems, the problems of life, cannot be "solved" once and for all; they can only be dealt with. With case studies we come to realize that facing the concrete situation individuates while de-personalizing; we lose our habits to gain our singularity, our uniqueness, at the intersection of the communal and individual I call “the body politic.”
In doing the Schiavo piece I end up arguing that we should re-conceive the ground for the right to privacy from sovereignty – control of a substantial body – to embodied and embedded singularity – our ability to feel, to generate intuitions that are embodied appraisals of socially embedded situations. In doing the Katrina piece, I argue that a racialized fear contributed to the delay in government rescue efforts in Hurricane Katrina until sufficient military force could confront thousands of black people in New Orleans; the government’s racialized fear flew in the face of the massive empathy of ordinary citizens, a communal solidarity that lead them to rescue their friends, neighbors, and simple strangers until they were forced to stop by government order. The political philosophy framework of the chapter comes out as I juxtapose the way in which pundits indulged a rhetoric of Hobbesian fantasy, when the reality was much more Rousseauean. In New Orleans, there was very little, if any, atomized anti-social predation; there was instead massive and spontaneous solidarity born out of empathy for threatened lives. If Hobbes was present at all in New Orleans, he was there beforehand in the atomizing practices of neoliberal capitalism, and afterward in the neoconservative militarization of rescue efforts. During the storm and the days of solidarity following it, he was absent.
And, although I am not unreservedly rousseauiste, the Hobbes / Rousseau contrast will show up again in my current book project, Human Nature between Philosophy and Anthropology. There I will join with others in criticizing the assumption that widespread pre-State warfare was the selection pressure for the evolution of human tendencies toward altruism and prosociality (or emotional investment in social patterns). If one adopts the position that there was not enough war prior to the simultaneous development of cities, agriculture, and states, to serve as a selection pressure, then we much come up with other explanations for altruism and prosociality. I present such an alternate explanation via recent work done in evolutionary anthropology, developmental psychology (so-called communicative musicality or intercorporeal rhythms), neuroplasticity, and epigenetics.
I don’t know how many more books I have in me, but I think this one will bear the mark of what I’ve been trying to do for years now: write philosophy with science, in a conceptually adventurous but empirically responsible way. So looking back at the distance from my first training to my current project, I’m seeing a pattern of shifts of the behavior of my “complex system” accompanied by a feeling of being conceptually at home when I’m on the move, synthesizing different schools of thought. In sum, I’ve been able to make a habit of changing my thinking habits, in response to the twists and turns, the invitations to new thinking, which the biographical accidents of my life have provided me.
Notes on James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).
Scott describes a multiplicity with topographical / transport-technological, political-economic, political-organizational, administrative, and violence elements. A multiplicity is a set of interacting processes in which thresholds in the relations of processes produce qualitative changes in the behavior of the system.
For Scott, “state” and “non-state” processes are in “dialectical” or “mutually constituting” relations. The “state” processes (enclosure, enslavement, taxing …) here are orienting limits, with classic, colonial, and post-colonial states with varying capacities to approach the limits and maintain / reproduce those gains. The “non-state” processes (flight, nomadicism, raiding …) also admit of degrees, with well-administered states in times of economic growth sometimes attracting non-state peoples to settle down. States and non-states exchange (at different rates at different times) people, customs, and goods across the “membrane” that frontiers provide, all mediated by smugglers, traders, brokers, peddlers, and so on.
However, the whole analysis is governed by the “last enclosure” thesis whereby post-WW2 “distance-destroying technologies” (roads / cars / ATVs; planes / helicopters / drones; electronic communications) are severely encroaching upon ability to live a self-governing or non-state life. However, again (something Scott underplays), climate change could quite possibly throw a spanner in the works and allow more leeway for non-state living.
I. Topographical / transport-technological (“friction of terrain”)
II. Political economy (production)
III. Political organization
IV. Ethnic / kinship / linguistic structures
V. Regimes of violence
Notes on James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).
PRINCIPLES OF ANALYSIS
I will rearrange the order of presentation in the Preface to emphasize some connections of principles. Under each of the three main headings there is a dialectic of escape and living free that is a theoretical mirror of the historical process being examined: first, a critical interpretation of state thought (escape) and then a positive project of examining the practices of self-governing peoples (living free).
ANTI-STATE-CENTRISM
CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF STATE DENIGRATION OF THE OTHER: “My argument is a deconstruction of Chinese and other civilizational discourses about the ‘barbarian,’ the ‘raw,’ the ‘primitive.’ On close inspection, those terms, practically, mean ungoverned, not-yet-incorporated. Civilizational discourses never entertain the possibility of people voluntarily going over to the barbarians, hence such statuses are stigmatized and ethnicized. Ethnicity and ‘tribe’ begin exactly where taxes and sovereignty end—in the Roman Empire as in the Chinese” (Preface, p x-xi).
POSITIVE PROJECT: WRITING THE HISTORY OF NON-STATE PEOPLES AS THE COMPLEMENT OF STATE-CENTERED HISTORY (the original and implicit affirmative universal “all history is that of the state” has to be changed to an explicit pair of particulars “not all history is that of the state” and “some history is that of non-state peoples”): “The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes this an anarchist history” (Preface, p x).
ANTI-PROGRESSIVISM
CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF STATE PROGRESSIVISM: From a state perspective, “self-governing peoples” are “living ancestors,” a glimpse of pre-agricultural, pre-civilized life. Here is a politics of anthropology, a way that progressivism or evolutionism is put to work, legitimating incorporation of non-state peoples to allow them access to modernity. Scott argues, on the contrary, “hill people are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare” (Preface, p ix).
POSITIVE PROJECT OF DESCRIBING “PRIMITIVISM” AS ANTI-STATE CHOICE: “the argument reverses much received wisdom about ‘primitivism’ generally. Pastoralism, foraging, shifting cultivation, and segmentary lineage systems are often a ‘secondary adaptation,’ a kind of ‘self-barbarization’ adopted by peoples whose location, subsistence, and social structure are adapted to state evasion. For those living in the shadow of states, such evasion is also perfectly compatible with derivative, imitative, and parasitic state forms in the hills” (Preface, p x).
ANTI-DETERMINISM
CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF ECOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL DETERMINISM, OR, PUTTING THE POLITICS INTO “POLITICAL ECONOMY”: “Usually, forms of subsistence and kinship are taken as given, as ecologically and culturally determined. By analyzing various forms of cultivation, particular crops, certain social structures, and physical mobility patterns for their escape value, I treat such givens as political choices” (Preface, p xi).
POSITIVE PROJECT OF DESCRIBING ANTI-STATE PRACTICES: “physical dispersion in rugged terrain, their mobility, their cropping practices, their kinship structures, their pliable ethnic identities, and their devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders all serve to avoid incorporation into states and to prevent states from springing up among them” (Preface, p x).
Yesterday I had the chance to participate in a pre-publication workshop on a book by Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers of NYU. The book concerns concepts of integration and individuality in early 20th century medicine, with special attention to military medicine in World War I.
In this note, I’d like to talk about Chapter 2, on case studies. I’ll talk about the manuscript, but also about what thoughts the ms provoked in me. As a philosopher, I was drawn to this chapter for four reasons. 1) The wide variety of logical relations involving individuals. 2) The epistemological question of a “science of the individual.” 3) The mind / body relation in shell shock. 4) The methodological one; we don’t do very many case studies in philosophy, but I think we should.
***
Let’s start with the logical relations. I see the following relations at work in the chapter.
Let’s stay with that one for a minute. In the Aristotelian schema, below the lowest difference forming the species are individuals who differ not logically but materially. As I work with Deleuze, let’s see what he does here; I’m quoting a PhD thesis I recently examined by DJ Allen at University of Warwick:
According to Deleuze, the sensible determinations for which the movement of the Hegelian dialectic fails to account are precisely non-conceptual differences. Deleuze finds persuasive, in this connection, a number of cases of what, in the introduction to Difference and Repetition, he calls conceptual ‘blockage’ (DR, p. 20 ff./p. 11 ff.). A concept is ‘blocked’ when it encounters a difference that it cannot specify; and this is precisely what happens, according to Deleuze, when conceptual thought is confronted by ‘differences of nature’ between individuals of the same general type, in other words, distinct individuals that instantiate the same concept (DI, p. 44/p. 33)
I’ll come back to Deleuze in the fourth topic, case studies as philosophical method. For now, we can note that Deleuze (following Simondon) emphasizes individuation as a process of “actualization” coming out of a pre-individual “field” which is the intensive expression of a virtual Idea or multiplicity composed of differential elements, relations, and singularities (for a brief treatment of Deleuze’s metaphysics, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article here).
Hence for Deleuze individuation is not a logical relation of participation, membership, instantiation, belonging, or exemplification, as they are all about the relation of a substance to different properties (or subject to different predicates). That is, they are about products, whereas Deleuze is about the production process, about individuation as the resolution or integration of a differential field. You can “freeze” the individuating process and consider the properties of the substance at a synchronic time-slice if you wish, but you should be aware of your action of freezing.
In a way, Deleuze is after a singular concept, a way of seeing the genesis of the individual from an actualization of an Idea that would provide the sufficient reason for the individual’s path through the world. (This is related to the Leibnizian notion of the unique function, or to the 3rd way of knowing for Spinoza.) This push to the singular concept is tied in with two Kantian notions. First, the reflective judgment in Critique of Judgment: not subsumption of a given under pre-existing concept but finding the concept for a given individual that eludes existing concepts. Second, Deleuzean individuals are like Kantian schematisms: they are ways of ordering spatial-temporal dynamisms adequate to a concept: this lion hunts this terrain, this hurricane takes this path — you can see the later Deleuzoguattarian notions of territory, refrain, haecceity.
We see the push to individual concepts at 123 of the Geroulanos and Meyers manuscript:
But for those who thought that “borderline cases” constituted genuine medical problems and signaled the failure of medical categories, thinking in cases demanded a very different logic: rather than physiological laws, they found in the proliferation of cases the reason of the case history. This problem became first of all one of categorization as the aggressive refinement of the categories of knowledge so that these could speak to particular patients—and not a refinement of the patient’s symptomatology so that it could fit into the existing categories.
And perhaps the unique spatial-temporal dynamism aspect at 127:
Philippe Huneman reflects on “such a simple thing” as the clinical case in Philippe Pinel’s early-nineteenth-century psychiatry, a story (historiette) that:
reports how one has fallen ill, and with what illness, what has happened to that patient once he or she became ill, how the patient is being treated, and finally if the person recovers. ‘Case’ then designated at the same time an ontological category – a case is a unique spatial-temporal entity, unlike a class, a property, or a rule – more than a discursive category; the case history is different from a demonstration, from an inference or a taxonomy.
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Second, let’s discuss a “science of the individual.” Geroulanos and Meyers mention both Aristotle and Foucault here. The Aristotelian impossibility of a science of the individual due to the infinite variation of individuals (their uniqueness or singularity [discussed at 127 of the ms.]) and the Foucaultian possibility of a science of the individual, which is laid out in Birth of the Clinic and in Discipline and Punish (to which Geroulanos and Meyers refer in note 41 of Ch 2).
In Birth of the Clinic, Foucault ties this possibility of a science of the individual to the pushing of categorial language onto perceptual singularity in case studies, thereby revealing the ontological relations of disease, life, and death. Quoting Gary Gutting, Foucault’s Archeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge UP, 1989):
But for anatomo-clinical experience, each case can be appreciated in its full individuality. “Only individual illnesses exist” (168). This is because the space of illness has now been entirely identified with the bodily space of the individual suffering from it. The entire reality and meaning of disease resides in its specific bodily sites. In this way, Foucault notes, contrary to the long-standing Aristotelian doctrine, a science of the individual is not only possible but necessary. Ironically, it is death, the destruction of the individual, that was the key unlocking this “forbidden, imminent secret: the knowledge of the individual” (170).
Here is Foucault from BC, 169-170:
It is no longer a question of correlating a perceptual sector and a semantic element, but of bending language back entirely towards that region in which the perceived, in its singularity, runs the risk of eluding the form of the word and of becoming finally imperceptible because incapable of being said. To discover, therefore, will no longer be to read an essential coherence beneath a state of disorder, but to push a little farther back the foamy line of language, to make it encroach upon that sandy region that is still open to the clarity of perception but is already no longer so to everyday speech—to introduce language into that penumbra where the gaze is bereft of words. …
Language and death have operated at every level of this experience, and in accordance with its whole density, only to offer at last to scientific perception what, for it, had remained for so long the visible invisible—the forbidden, imminent secret: the knowledge of the individual. (BC, 169-170)
In Discipline and Punish, on the other hand, the description is much less melodramatic, it is much more administrative than ontological. We approach a science of the individual due to advances in examination and recordkeeping: the construction of dossiers with indexing allowing compilation of statistics.
Thanks to the whole apparatus of writing that accompanied it, the examination opened up two correlative possibilities: firstly, the constitution of the individual as a describable, analysable object, not in order to reduce him to 'specific' features, as did the naturalists in relation to living beings, but in order to maintain him in his individual features, in his particular evolution, in his own aptitudes or abilities, under the gaze of a permanent corpus of knowledge and, secondly, the constitution of a comparative system that made possible the measurement of overall phenomena, the description of groups, the characterization of collective facts, the calculation of the gaps between individuals, their distribution in a given 'population'.
These small techniques of notation, of registration, of constituting 6les, of arranging facts in columns and tables that are so familiar to us now, were of decisive importance in the epistemological 'thaw' of the sciences of the individual. One is no doubt right to pose the Aristotelean problem: is a science of the individual possible and legitimate? A great problem needs great solutions perhaps. But there is the small historical problem of the emergence, towards the end of the eighteenth century, of what might generally be termed the 'clinical' sciences the problem of the entry of the individual (and no longer the species) into the field of knowledge; the problem of the entry of the individual description, of the cross-examination, of anamnesis, of the 'file' into the general functioning of scientific discourse.
To this simple question of fact, one must no doubt give an answer lacking in 'nobility': one should look into these procedures of writing and registration, one should look into the mechanisms of examination, into the formation of the mechanisms of discipline, and of a new type of power over bodies. Is this the birth of the sciences of man? It is probably to be found in these 'ignoble' archives, where the modern play of coercion over bodies, gestures and behaviour has its beginnings. (DP, 190-191)
So a suggestion for the case study chapter would be a brief treatment of the recordkeeping procedures in WWI medicine that allowed comparison of cases.
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Third is the mind/ body relation in shell shock. I’ve recently been following the introduction of the concept of “moral injury” into PTSD discussions.
The traditional etiology of PTSD has been physiological trauma from prolonged episodes of stress with involvement of both fear and anger. PTSD is thus usually seen as physiological overload resulting in flashbacks, low threat thresholds and hyper-arousal, etc.
“Moral injury” as a type of PTSD is based on psychological trauma: what happens to you due to how you experience what you have done to others. Moral injury involves a betrayal of moral framework resulting in symptoms of guilt, shame, loss of enthusiasm for life, and risk of self-harm via alcohol and suicide. I’ve come across two theories of moral injury.
First is the group focus or even culturalism of Jonathan Shay (author of Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America) write of a “betrayal of ‘what’s right’ in a high-stakes situation by someone who holds power.” (Thus in Shay’s Homer analogy, it all starts with Agamemnon stealing Briseus from Achilles.) Shay writes of the need for cultural purification to aid those suffering from moral injury:
Our society lacks any real understanding of what's needed for purification after battle. We need rituals, we need liturgies, we need narratives, we need artworks. We all need to clean ourselves up after war. These people went on our behalf and in our name, and we need to purify as a community, not just as just say to this returning veteran you need purification.
Second, Litz et al, 2009 is individualized; it’s about the soldier as much as or more than about the commander: “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” (Clinical Psych Rev, 2009)
In moral injury you can see a sort of “retrospective agency” (an idea I mention here). Even when the practical agent is group with de-subjectified / borderline conscious agents such that many soldiers take moral responsibility even in a situation of distributed agency. There thus seems to be a move against “bad faith”: many cling to guilt, haunted by the feeling that they “could have done something.” Could we even talk about a “centripetal” subject that is irresponsible in taking upon itself this responsibility?
A further twist is PTSD in drone pilots (this implies there is a PTSD for each assemblage?) Gregoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone lays this out nicely: Drone pilots are physically far away and hence shielded from harm, but affectively close due to video images. (Note that there is a question of how much resolution the military allows in public vs what the operators see. Eyal Weizman, “Violence at the Threshold of Detectability,” e-flux, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/violence-at-the-threshold-of-detectability/.)
Peter Asaro (2013): “The labor of surveillance and bureaucratized killing.” Social Semiotics (free access here). Quotes from drone pilots
Also interesting is an interview with Ethan Hawke about Good Kill (2014)
Contemporary military medicine discusses two types of stress in drone pilots: operational and combat stress. Operational stress: long hours, shift work, transition back and forth from combat to home life. Combat stress: seeing the images of injury and death – moral injury. Most personnel report operational stress as contributing to burnout and cynicism, though combat stress can play a role in individual cases.
See: “Facets of Occupational Burnout Among U.S. Air Force Active Duty and National Guard/Reserve MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper Operators, 2011.” Joseph A. Ouma, Wayne L. Chappelle, Amber Salinas. Accessed via: http://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/a548103.pdf
So one question I had for Geroulanos and Meyers was to any analogues to moral injury in the shell shock literature of WWI. Relevant here would be the differences among physical and perceptual distance and intensity of battlefield engagements, from bayonet attacks to artillery work. How one faced and dealt out death on the battlefield might be associated with different forms of physiological and psychological trauma.
***
Fourth, in a departure from the Geroulanos and Meyers ms I’d like to say a few things about case studies as a method for philosophical work. We don’t do too many of them, as opposed to our standard methods: 1) textual interpretation; 2) thought experiments; and, now, 3) “experimental philosophy” studies. But I think we should start using them, for Deleuzean reasons.
From an interview with University of Minnesota Press about Political Affect (2009).
I think case studies are an important and under-used tool in philosophy, as opposed to thought experiments. As generations of philosophy students know, one of the most famous of all philosophical concepts, Descartes’s cogito (“I think, therefore I am”), is arrived at via the thought experiment of the evil genius, who can fool you about the real reference of all your ideas. But he can’t fool you that you’re thinking while you’re being fooled. (You can be mistaken that you’re sitting at your computer, but you can’t be mistaken that you think you’re sitting at your computer.)
Contemporary philosophy has lots and lots of thought experiments: not just the brain-in-a-vat, which updates Descartes, but also zombies, teleportation, Twin Earth, Swampman, a whole bestiary and cartography of strange beings and places! But it has very few case studies. Why is that?
I think it’s because much of contemporary philosophy is still basically “essentialist.” That is, thought experiments aim at identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for an essential distinction. With a thought experiment you try to find the core unshakeable idea that provides the criterion for membership of a thing in a category. What properties does this thing share with other things, but only those other things, in this category? Thought experiments want to end with a particular type of “eureka,” the classifying eureka: Aha, this fits here, and that fits there!
But with case studies we’re not after essential distinctions at the borders of categories. Instead, we’re trying to explore concrete situations and the “problems” they express. Here is where my reliance on the thought of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze comes in. Deleuze did not think in terms of essences that would slot things into categories, but thought that events are the points of intersection of “multiplicities.” That’s a technical term for Deleuze which roughly speaking means a field in which several processes meet to produce events, much as a crystal or a lightning bolt or a hurricane forms out of a field of multiple processes. In dealing with analogous multiplicities in our social fields we see that (1) any one move changes the conditions for future moves and that (2) no one solution exhausts the potentials for future creatively different solutions.
Now to express the sense of this irreducible complexity, Deleuze thought multiplicities formed “problematic” fields, and these Deleuzean problems, the problems of life, cannot be "solved" once and for all; they can only be dealt with. My friend James Williams uses this example of a problem: “should we raise the interest rate?” You can see how any one move here will change the condition for future moves and that no one move will ever exhaust the problem: we’ll still have to think what we should do with the interest rate, always – or at least until the economic system changes so drastically that other pressures produce other problems. A problem might cease to be a problem, but the world will always be problematic.
So using case studies we come to realize that concrete situations are “problematic” in this sense. The more we explore the Schiavo case, the Columbine case, the Katrina case, the more we realize that concrete situations are “crystallizations” of a problematic field, and that a change here or there, if it occurs at a critical point, might make all the difference in the world.
The real issue at stake is that thought experiments looking at essences have a basically static image of the world. Things have properties, and our job is to find the essential distinctions that enable us to group them with other things with the same core set of properties. But Deleuze thinks we need to look to the processes that produce things with properties. And those processes have “singularities” or turning points.
So what we’re doing with a case study is seeing what processes have come together to form this concrete situation and in so doing we find their singularities, those places where if things had been different, the process and hence the situation which is the product of those processes, would also have been different.
FOUCAULT 7/13: RESONANCE WITH DELEUZE
In last night’s seminar Adam Tooze referred to Deleuze’s reading of Foucault. In this note I’d like to propose that we can see elements of Deleuze’s thought in Foucault's lectures in the mid-to-late 1970s. I don’t want to claim anything more than “resonance” here; that is, I’m not going to claim “influence” or “dependence,” though I might be willing to accept a claim of a shared intellectual milieu between Deleuze and Foucault, a mutual suspicion of universals and identities, and a mutual desire to analyze the differential field from which those identities emerge. Further, we have seen in the 13/13 seminar so far a number of references to Deleuze or Deleuze and Guattari in Foucault’s lecture courses, and of course we should note that Foucault reviewed Deleuze’s late-1960s works Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense as well as providing the Preface to the English translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.
Deleuze's ontology in Difference and Repetition posits individuation as the integration of a multiplicity. A multiplicity is a distributed and differential system, that is, a system in which multiple processes interact such that qualitative changes in the behavior of the system occur at singular points in the relation of the rates of change of those processes. For a meteorological example, consider how, at a singular point, the relation of the rates of change of temperature, air pressure, air circulation, water vapor concentration, condensation, evaporation and so on will be such that a hurricane forms, an emergent individual worthy of a proper name.
In this note, I'll track Foucault’s use of the concept of integrating a differential field or "multiplicity" to produce an emergent individual.
In History of Sexuality, volume 1, Foucault sees "power" as a multiplicity: "It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization" (HS1, 121-22F / 92E).War is seen as a practical option for "coding" the multiplicity of force relations, that is, an optional and precarious "strategy" for integrating them:
Should we turn the expression around, then, and say that politics is war pursued by other means? If we still wish to maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we should postulate that this multiplicity of force relations can be coded—in part but never totally—either in the form of 'war,' or in the form of 'politics'; this would imply two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch into the other) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, and tense force relations (HS1, 123F / 93E; emphasis added)
So, looking at the social field in terms of power lets us see war as a possible strategy for integrating a multiplicity of force relations, as an active strategy of political practice, a way of effecting a regime of power.
In Security Territory Population and Birth of Biopolitics, however, the war model is left behind and the grid of intelligibility is governmentality. Nonetheless, Foucault continues with a differential method, looking at individuation as the integration of a multiplicity producing emergent effects.
In naming his differential historical methodology, Foucault insists upon the difference between a genealogy and a "genetic" analysis that proceeds by identifying a unitary source that splits into two. To establish intelligibility, he asks, "could we not … start not from unity, and not even from … duality, but from the multiplicity of extraordinarily diverse processes" (STP, 244F / 238E; emphasis added). Foucault continues that establishing the intelligibility of these processes would entail "showing [montrant] phenomena of coagulation, support, reciprocal reinforcement, cohesion and integration" (STP, 244F / 238-239E; emphasis added).
These phenomena form a set of interacting processes; in the Deleuzean manner, the integration of such a multiplicity produces an emergent effect: "in short it would involve showing the bundle [faisceau] of processes and the network [réseau] of relations that ultimately induced as a cumulative, overall effect, the great duality" (STP, 244F / 239E). Foucault's emergentism is clear as he concludes this very important passage:
At bottom, maybe intelligibility in history does not lie in assigning a cause that is always more or less a metaphor for the source. Intelligibility in history would perhaps lie in something that we could call the constitution or composition of effects. How are overall, cumulative effects composed? How is nature constituted as an overall effect? How is the state effect constituted on the basis of a thousand diverse processes …? [Comment se composent des effets globaux, comment se composent des effets de masse? Comment s'est constitué l'effet Etat à partir de mille processus divers …? ]" (STP, 244F / 239E).
Foucault's contribution is to provide governmentality as the grid of intelligibility that reveals this emergence of the state effect as the integration of a multiplicity of processes.
In STP, Foucault provides us with a genealogy of the modern state on the basis of the history of governmental reason. In the 19th century we see the breakup of the administrative state's police apparatus into different institutions: economic practice; population management; law and respect for freedom; and the police (in the contemporary sense of a state apparatus that intervenes to stop disorder). These are added to the diplomatic-military apparatus (STP 362F / 354E).
But it's crucial to see that the administrative state's police apparatus that is here broken up was itself differential; it was not a unitary source. It arose with raison d'Etat, which is itself "something completely different [which] emerges in the seventeenth century" (STP 346F / 338E). The administrative state emerges from a "cluster [faisceau] of intelligible and analyzable relations that allow a number of fundamental elements to be linked together [lier] like the faces of a single polyhedron" (STP 346F / 338E).
Again we see the notion of the linking together of differential elements and relations.[1] Foucault here lists four elements: the art of government thought as raison d'Etat; competition of states while maintaining European equilibrium; police; and the emergence of the market town and its problems of cohabitation and circulation (themselves being, quite obviously, a differential field of multiple processes and practices).
So police is part of a larger dispositif, and is itself concerned with a multiplicity of all the factors going into providing for the being and well-being of men, that well-being which, in a fascinating phrase, Foucault qualifies as a "well-being beyond being [ce bien-être au-delà de l'être]" (STP 335F / 328E).[2] More precisely, police integrates relations between the increase of those forces and the good order of the state (321F / 313E). Police does not deal with things but with "forces" that arise from adjusting the relations among the rates of increase of multiple processes.
NOTES
[1] The editor of Naissance notes the appearance of similar language defining a genealogy in terms of "singularity" and "multiple determining elements" in a roughly contemporaneous essay by Foucault (NB 50n8F / 49n8E).
[2] Is the mere "being" of men here just physical survival that forces men back onto themselves in desperate selfishness, while "well-being" allows for productive relations among men? So that free sociality is dependent on a guarantee of the necessities of life? In another context, we might attempt to draw out the classic questions of the relations of oikos and polis, of necessity and freedom, from this small phrase of Foucault's.
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