Episode #127 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is part three in a series on Deleuze. I hope you love the show today.

So in 1983 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari released the first book of what would eventually be a two-volume series that aimed at discussing the political reality of the modern Western world. The title of the series, that was alluding to the situation they’re about to describe in the Western world, was Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Now, the forward of the first book was written by someone we recently talked about on this show, Michel Foucault. And Foucault, when writing the forward to this book, talks about how the 20th century has been marked by a whole bunch of philosophers looking back, trying to warm over and reimagine the work of Freud and Marx in an attempt to arrive at some sort of synthesis, some new interpretation or combination of these older ideas that can provide us with a new perspective moving forward.

Remember, Freud and Marx are seen as the sort of proto-structuralists that foreshadowed the structuralism of the 20th century. Freud, through the introduction of the concept of the unconscious mind, showed how it was possible that fundamental parts of your character and preferences and motivations can come from places that you’re completely unaware of, at least consciously. Marx, through his superstructure theory we talked about, showed how it was possible that things that are produced within a society, including ideas, always emerge first out of an economic climate that people are born into. A lot of philosophers were going back and looking at the work of both these thinkers. We’ve seen examples of this in the work of some of the Frankfurt School: Marcuse, for example, and his reworking of Freud in Eros and Civilization or his new Hegelian interpretation of Marx that tried to breathe new life into some of these older ideas.

But Foucault says two people who didn’t go this route are Deleuze and Guattari. Remember, Deleuze, who’s a postmodernist, would never center his philosophy around the thinking of Freud or Marx. I mean, to Deleuze, to think of yourself -- I mean, to think of your thought in terms of being a Freudian or a Marxist is just incredibly naïve, at least to a postmodernist citizen interested in sweeping grand narratives like that. To Deleuze, to go back and try to microwave up some leftover Freud and Marx to find some new ideas moving forward, you’re trapping yourself in modernity. Freud and Marx are, in many ways, trapped in modernity. And if you relegate yourself to an ism, whether it’s Freudianism or Marxism or anything, the best you will ever have, to Deleuze, is a single vantage point. The best you’ll ever do is see the universe from one angle and then spend the rest of your life arguing for why your angle is the angle everybody else should be viewing it from.

See, because again, Deleuze is a philosopher of new ideas. We saw how he called into question the entire history of ontology when he was searching for new ideas there. Well, he does this exact same thing when he turns his focus towards the political realm. See, if it seems like the modern political landscape doesn’t have any new perspectives being offered, if it feels like it’s mostly made up of the same groups having the same arguments with each other over and over again, well, that’s because for hundreds of years we’ve been looking at things from the same angle over and over again. The political landscape is similarly trapped in modernity. Deleuze is going to call for us to look at things from a different angle. And, by different, he means different from the long, classical liberal tradition spanning from the work of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau of always viewing politics through the lens of the individual -- the individual with their individual desires, individual needs, individual issues that affect them; thinking about political change in terms of an individual vote and how a candidate or the government’s going to bring about a world that fulfills what they individually see as important.

But Deleuze is going to ask, could we be looking at politics in a completely different way? I mean, we always look at things in terms of these old, worn out political categories, like the individual but also the state, society, nationality, race. But is it possible to look at politics from a perspective that’s much more adaptive and fluid than any single option like that, maybe one that can change in a moment and see things from a variety of different perspectives simultaneously instead of our tendency, which has always been to pick a single perspective and then exalt it onto a pedestal as “the way that things are.” When you look at things in the world solely in terms of the individual or any of these traditional, rigid political categories, you can miss out on so many other perspectives that might reveal to you an interconnectedness of all these complex systems that makes hyper-focusing on any single one perspective seem like a waste of time.

And, if this reminds you of the relationship between Deleuze’s ontology of difference and the traditional ontologies that have existed throughout history, you may be starting to understand his approach here. Now, just to be clear, Deleuze is not saying that we shouldn’t be looking at things through the lens of the individual or society or the state or whatever. What he’s saying is that we should recognize these things to be what they are, single perspectives. We can’t limit ourselves to a single perspective as a species. And this is part of the reason Deleuze and Guattari introduce another approach towards these political units that we view everything through. Deleuze and Guattari ask us to consider the world, instead, through the lens of what they call “machines.”

So what are machines? Well, it’s important to note right at the outset here that Deleuze and Guattari are introducing the term “machine” to specifically try to get away from the common way of thinking about this stuff that was prevalent during their time, which was viewing things in terms of the individual subject. The subject is what they’re trying to get away from for a number of reasons, not only because they’re trying to get away from thinking about politics through this conventional, classical liberal tradition that we’ve been looking at it through for hundreds of years, but also because, when somebody says the word “subject” and defines people that way, then it becomes extremely easy for someone to mistake subject for consciousness, to mistakenly think that when someone talks about a subject as a political unit, what they’re referencing is really just the individual consciousnesses of people. This is clearly an oversimplification. When we’re talking about political change, there’s clearly more that Deleuze and Guattari want to reference other than just consciousness, so they sort of distance themselves by introducing this new concept of “machine” that they define much more broadly.

The term “machine” is used in multiple different ways over the course of multiple different works. To define what a machine is in a single sentence is impossible. Deleuze and Guattari themselves often talk about machines as total multiplicity, as not being definable by the sum of their parts. So I’m going to give metaphors and examples. But maybe the best place to insert ourselves into this discussion about machines from the outside is to just talk for a few about machines generally.

So we’ve already mentioned how machines can be seen as a unit or an entity that we can use to think about how political change occurs in the world. Well, one way to clarify that would be to say that we can think of machines as entities within a given political landscape, or the world for that matter, that seek connections with other machines in an attempt to bring about a particular actuality. Now, that may sound abstract or like it’s difficult to understand what they mean. But, by actuality, they’re referencing the work of Bergson and his theory of time that we talked about last time with the distinction between the virtual and the actual. Machines, and everything that falls under that heading, actualize the political reality that we all live in.

So just at first glance we can already see that Deleuze is trying to get people to think more broadly about what they think of as an entity that’s trying to bring about political change in the world. Maybe it’s not as narrow as we’ve been looking at things for the past couple hundred years. To Deleuze and Guattari, the political landscape is not just a bunch of individuals interacting with each other trying to get people to vote a certain way. By using this broader definition of machines that are seeking connections, they’re offering a much more versatile political unit to view things through, one that accounts for things that are clearly not individuals but, nonetheless, have an undeniable agenda towards bringing about political change.

Quick example before we talk some more about machines, political movements. Let me explain. So individuals are examples of one type of machine that exists. A group would be an example of another type of machine. These two things are examples of machines in the sense that they are entities seeking connections with other machines, trying to bring about an actuality. They’re machines in that they weren’t created by anything for an extremely particular purpose. And what I mean by that is, an important aspect of a machine to Deleuze and Guattari is that it doesn’t have a fixed purpose and can change its goals or desires at any time. This is where it starts to get interesting when it comes to how we look at the moving parts that are bringing about political change in the world. Because based on this criteria for what classifies a machine, couldn’t we think of things like social or political movements as machines in their own rights as well? I mean, they too weren’t created with a rigid, inflexible purpose in mind. They aren’t beholden to a fixed identity. We could say a movement is just as much an entity that seeks connections with other machines, like people, for the sake of producing something.

For example, take the movement of environmentalism -- or the green movement, or save the planet, whatever you want to call it -- this movement can be thought of as an extremely complex machine that’s connected to millions of other machines, people, groups, moving parts of all kinds. And this machine is always seeking more connections. Picture environmentalism meetups, tree planting, speeches, public service announcements, signs, bumper stickers, a community potluck where we all get together and recycle some stuff. Consider the fact this machine is always embedding itself into other groups, leveraging other machines to be able to bring about its own actuality. Picture the NFL having their players wear a green wristband to promote environmental awareness or a car company changing their exhaust system so it’s more environmentally friendly. Not only that, but very similar to what an individual or a group is in a given moment, a movement in a given moment is defined by the sum total of the connections that make it up in that moment, connections that can change and are constantly, always changing. Once again, there is no fixed identity. Like these other types of machines, a movement is flexible. It has a fluidity to it. It can evolve and adapt.

Now, that said, machines are not just limited to individuals, groups, or political movements. There are, of course, tons of other examples of abstract political processes that can be thought of as machines. But the really important thing that I want to emphasize here is the fact that machines go in the other direction as well. Just as a group of machines, a collection of people, can make up a larger machine in the form of a political movement, collections of machines make up the individual. We are ourselves a complex collection of machines and their processes. Deleuze and Guattari give the example of a new mother. We can even think about machines at the level of bodily processes. They say the breast of a new mother can be thought of as a machine just as the mouth of a newborn baby can be thought of as a machine, each seeking connections with other machines, and each using the connections with other machines to actualize themselves. Machines connect with other machines to actualize reality.

But the big shift here from the traditional way we’ve thought about things -- thinking about political change in terms of machines, which are themselves complex groups of connections driving other machines, which are also complex groups of connections, allows for a level of flexibility that traditional political categories like the individual just don’t offer. The famous quote from the book about machines is, “Everywhere it is machines -- real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections…we are all handymen: each with his little machines.” So that’s the famous quote.

The common example people give to talk about how these machines actually work is to consider a bicycle. So a bicycle is a machine. By itself, the bicycle just kind of sits there, purely virtual in terms of its potential. When a bike sits by itself in a garage, it doesn’t have a sliver of hope to become actualized in any way. What the bicycle needs are other machines around it to make connections with, those connections determining what the actuality is that’s going to be realized. So, for example, a bike doesn’t have a fixed identity. Say that the machine of a bicycle connects with the machine of a human being. That person could do a thousand different things with that bicycle. They could ride it around as transportation. Yes, that might be the first thing we think of. But think of all the other ways that bike could be actualized. They could take the bike apart and sell the parts at a bike shop. They could give the bike to charity. They could see the bike as a sculpted work of art they’re going to put on display at their house. They could name the bike, think of the bike as their new imaginary best friend. They could beat somebody to death with the bike. They could hook the bike up to some sort of stationary treadmill situation that generates power when you turn the pedals. The point is, there is no fixed purpose of a bicycle. And it’s only through its connections with other machines around it that its momentary purpose becomes actualized.

Think of the parallels to individuals, groups, and political movements here. Political movements are machines. People are machines. Think of how often political movements use the individual human beings that make up the movement like this person we’re talking about uses this bicycle. Once again, as Deleuze says, it’s everywhere, machines driving machines, machines being driven by machines. Not only that, think of how possible it is for an individual, especially one in a position of leadership, to use the machine of a political movement to bring about something for their own personal gain. Again, machines driving machines. When we remove the default humanism of the way we’ve traditionally thought about politics and instead think about it in terms of complex groups of connections interacting with other groups of connections, we open the door to new perspectives that see things from a different angle.

For example, consider for a second the earth as a machine. And instead of thinking about it solely in a humanistic way, consider the slightly different perspective of seeing the movement of environmentalism as the machine of the earth driving other machines that are a part of what makes it up, people, to make further connections that promote a certain agenda that’s in its best interest. This is a very simple example of how thinking in terms of machines as political units starts to open up different perspectives than just looking at it in terms of how people feel about it.

A few more important points about this concept of a machine. Deleuze says that machines are always connected to other machines. And what this means is that machines are always productive in some sense but, again, only when connected to other machines. Deleuze and Guattari at this point introduce a concept that’s a driving force behind machines and what motivates them to produce things or seek connections with other machines in the first place. See, as far as they can tell, this driving force is not only the driving force behind machines and their behavior; it seems to them to be a fundamental driver of all life in the universe, something they call “desire production.”

Now, the name “desire production” is pretty transparently just a mash up of the driving force of desire from Freud and the driving force of production from Marx. But Deleuze and Guattari aren’t looking at the work of Freud and Marx so they can rework their ideas and come up with some sort of synthesis. They look at their ideas and launch one of the most radical critiques of their work in existence. People sometimes go so far as to say that what Deleuze and Guattari do is not so much critique their work but subsume it.

Probably the best place to start is with their reinterpretation of both Freud’s concept of desire and Marx’s production. See, traditionally the way people have thought about desire is that people always desire something that’s lacking in their life. The lack of something is what creates the desire to produce in the individual. But Deleuze and Guattari are going to question this. They’re going to say that desire and production are, in fact, default, fundamental properties of what it is to be a machine at all, which includes what it is to be a human being. Desire drives these connections between machines. And, in the same sense, put a little more dramatically by Deleuze, desire produces reality. Desire is the vehicle for changing things from the virtual to the actual. Desire isn’t a motivating force that’s responding to a lack of something. Desire production is inherent to life itself.

Think of desire production as Deleuze’s version of Nietzsche’s will to power. So this is the reason the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is titled Anti-Oedipus. To Deleuze, just as there’s no transcendent governing body that dictates the rules of ontology. There’s no transcendent governing body external to you, like Freud’s Oedipus, that dictates what desires you feel or what connections you’re going to seek as a desiring machine. Desire isn’t something dictated by some standard of living out there and what you’re lacking in relation to that standard. Desire is a natural process of experimentation. What this also implies is that desire is not something that’s located deep within the psyche of the individual. What desire really is is a social force.

Just for a second, what Deleuze is trying to do here is get us to rethink the concept of desire so that we might be able to rescue it from these rigid, outdated theories and instead see it for what it actually is to him, the source of revolution, the only real source of revolution that we have. This desire production -- fundamental to all life, the very thing that drives machines to take action turning the virtual into the actual at all -- desire is revolutionary. And it’s been suppressed over the years not only by the work of Freud but any form of psychoanalysis that relies on transcendent, external concepts. Jacques Lacan is another target of theirs.

They’re calling into question this older, Freudian, lack-based view of desire, and what they’re going to say is that this Oedipal way of looking at desire has very real consequences on the societies that believe in it because in these societies desire becomes something that gets turned inward towards your immediate family. What you think of as your desires is really just you misinterpreting some deeply rooted, psycho-sexual framework that you don’t quite understand. The result of this on a social level being that the vast majority of the desire of the individual gets interpreted inwardly, and any excess desire someone might have, however small of an amount that may be, well, that’s the only desire that can eventually spill over into the social and political realms to try to bring about change. But here’s the thing. Even that very small amount of desire that spills over is always subject to the limitations of the social and political realms, which are themselves, to Deleuze and Guattari, conveniently controlled by the forces of capitalism.

Now, in an interview in the 1990s, towards the end of his life, Deleuze says that he still refers to himself as a Marxist. To people unfamiliar with the rest of his work and the rest of the interview, this has caused some to label Deleuze some sort of postmodernist, neo-Marxist type. But even a cursory reading of the rest of his work would, no doubt, make someone really confused. I mean, how can this guy be a Marxist when he spends so much time in his work talking about how rigid, hierarchical systems like Marxism are not even close to the full story? The answer is that Deleuze is not a Marxist in the traditional sense of the word. He was speaking in a philosophical context, that in the sense that so much of the work of Marx was dedicated to an analysis and critique of capitalism, for anyone that wants to be doing meaningful work in the field of economics during his time, you’re probably going to want to start from an analysis and critique of capitalism, which is what he and Guattari do in Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

So, if throughout the course of their two books they have anything negative to say about capitalism, this isn’t coming from the perspective of some tribal, hateful Marxist that wants to do away with one rigid system and replace it with another. No, their perspective is more like, just because capitalism is better than the feudal system that doesn’t mean that we’re done talking about economics for the rest of time. How else are we going to make the world a better place if we don’t critique the dominant ideas of our time? And who’s going to critique them other than the dominant economic and political philosophers of our time? The aim of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is less a hit piece on capitalism, like so many works of the past which would be boring to them, and more an analysis on what natural effects capitalism has on the world and what problems if any are created by that.

Nothing showcases this fact more than all the good things Deleuze and Guattari have to say about capitalism. They credit capitalism with drastically improving the lives of almost everyone on the planet by abolishing the hierarchical rules and power structures of the middle ages. You know, say you’re a peasant living under the feudal system. There are tons of rules that are imposed upon you by the aristocracy and landowners. Now, if at any point you don’t like one of those rules or one of those rules makes your life absolutely miserable, there’s really not much you can do. I mean, you can’t request a transfer to another plot of land. You can’t save up and buy a different plot of land where you make your own rules. But in capitalism, this isn’t the case. And this is often given by proponents of capitalism for why it’s the best economic system we have. Show me another economic system where, if a worker is alienated or miserable because of their job, they can work hard, apply themselves, and go get some other job that they enjoy more with no detriment to society as a whole. That’s a strength of capitalism over the feudal system. And Deleuze and Guattari would certainly agree with that.

What they’d probably say next, though, is that just because somebody has the freedom to change jobs and not be subjected to the rules of a landowner does not mean that they’re free or that capitalism as an economic system is impervious to criticism. Yes, capitalism has dismantled feudalism or, as they say, deterritorialized these rigid rule systems people had to live under in the past. But then after deterritorializing these rules, capitalism then reterritorialized it with an axiomatic. Or, more simply put, capitalism, notably the world of banking and finance, dictate every narrow parameter that human beings have to navigate their lives. We’re going to talk about how in the next episode along with Deleuze’s concept of looking at the universe in terms of different flows and a constant process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

But how Deleuze and Guattari arrive at this unique analysis of capitalism and how things change and connect together in the universe is by looking at the universe through a different lens than any philosopher that had come before them. Let’s talk about that lens. This is one of the most important concepts in all of the work of Deleuze, his concept of the rhizome. This is a good way to end the episode because it’s something to think about throughout the week so that next time you can understand where they’re coming from a little bit more. Now, a common thread, that by this point you’ve no doubt noticed in Deleuze, is that he’s looking back at our history as a species and how we’ve looked at things in terms of what he sees as rigid, narrow categories, and he’s trying to offer a different perspective, one where we step outside the traditional ways we’ve thought about things like ontology or politics. And, by considering different approaches, by looking at things in terms of difference, the hope is that we might be able to see that traditional accounts of the way that things are don’t even come close to telling us the full story.

He compares the dogmatic way that we’ve traditionally thought about things to a tree. Now, a tree is very straightforward. It’s rooted in one place, not moving. There are clear lines of demarcation between the different parts of that tree. There are the roots. The roots give way to the trunk. Trunk gives way to the branches. Branches give way to the leaves. That’s a tree. Point is, there’s a clear beginning, middle, and end to that tree. And that tree is structured in a hierarchical way, much like our systems of ideas from the past like we’ve talked about over the course of this series, be it in ontology or Freud’s psychology or anything else. Deleuze would also want us to consider that the different parts of this hierarchy work together within the tree. Roots gather the moisture, goes to the trunk, which goes to the branches and the leaves. Leaves collect sunlight and then sends it all the way back down the tree. In other words, this is a static system with well-defined parts that perform specific functions for the whole of the tree. And again, the structure of this tree and the way the parts work together, mirrors the structure of the way we’ve traditionally thought about ontology or politics.

For example, a deeply rooted system incapable of movement with well-defined parts that make it up and perform different functions. For example, the individual, the state, the economy, laws, these things all work together and play their part within a system. Okay, so we have this great visual of a static, rigidly defined tree that Deleuze compares to the way we often think about politics. But a more accurate way of looking at what that tree really is, to Deleuze, is to think of it as a single pattern. We shouldn’t think of the hierarchy and tree of our modern political system as the way that things are, but instead think of it as a single pattern that happens to be the way we talk about politics in this particular day and age. There are countless other ways we might otherwise be talking about politics, countless other angles we might view it from, which is why, if you wanted to come up with some sort of plant-based analogy describing our modern political landscape that was more accurate, take that tree that embodies the narrow way we’ve looked at politics for hundreds of years; pull the entire tree out of the ground, roots and all. Shrink it by about a hundred times until it’s the size of a baseball and, instead, picture that tree as just a tiny part of a giant wall of vines and leaves spanning off in every direction.

This is where Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome comes into play. So a rhizome in the world of plants is an extremely chaotic and unpredictable root structure. Actually, depending on the baggage you’re bringing to the word “chaos” that might not be the best way to describe it. And I think technically a rhizome is a subterranean plant stem, not a root. But, look, none of these labels really matter. The point is, look up a picture of one. A rhizome is a root structure that doesn’t grow in a uniform direction or pattern like a tree. Its root system is not fixed to one place in the ground, like a tree. When you look at a rhizome, there’s no clear beginning, middle, and end to what’s going on. The rhizome at any point in time can sprout out a new root on the side of it in a completely different direction. And then that root can have other roots growing out of it, seemingly randomly, in all different directions as well.

What follows from this, naturally, is that networks of root systems become formed, and then these random root offshoots can oftentimes connect one network of roots to another network of roots, sometimes in bizarre ways. This is a much more accurate metaphor for Deleuze when it comes to how thought, ideas, and movements link together. Think of the visual of the giant wall covered by vines again. Where is the center of that vine? Where’s the beginning, middle, and end to that vine? There isn’t one to Deleuze, just as there’s no beginning, middle, and end to systems of ideas, just people getting tunnel visioned on one little section of the wall and then making a case for why they have the whole wall figured out because they’re looking at this one section.

This is the mistake of the philosophers of the last 2,000 years. When someone creates a hierarchical system of ideas -- when someone makes a tree, all that a tree really is is a blocked rhizome, one little section of the wall masquerading as the whole wall. For example, consider two networks of roots that may in the past have been thought of as completely different from each other. Let’s say political power and linguistics. So in the past we may have studied these very different fields and thought of them as completely separate from each other. Nobody goes to school for both these things simultaneously. How often throughout history have we seen someone who specializes in linguistics writing extensive commentary on political power or vice versa?

But on closer examination, consider how many ways these two systems are connected. Consider how ideas and linguistics often dictate the boundaries of how we’re even able to talk about politics. They dictate the boundaries of what we can even bring up as criticism of people in political power. They dictate how we can even think about our relationship to political power. But it goes the other way as well. Think about how often people in political power will try to control the language that is used to be able to get elected or stay in power. Consider how calculated, down to the word, their use of language is in speeches to try to harness that political power. To think of linguistics and political power as two distinct fields that can be studied and fully understood in isolation from each other is an old way of thinking. There are roots that connect these networks of roots, and then roots that connect both of these networks with countless other networks of roots.

When you pay attention and look closely, to Deleuze, the universe is a rhizome. Rhizomes are everywhere, not just in human ideas. Sure, there’s the actual rhizome and the wall of ivy and many other plants for that matter, but consider the countless other examples all around us: ant colonies, rat burrows, termite nests, vast ecosystems, human cultures, nervous systems, the layout of a city, the behavior of the people within that city. And, yes, this is also the development of human ideas. Books are rhizomes that are connected to other books, other documentaries, other magazines, movies, etc. Philosophical systems are rhizomes connected to everything around them. This rhizomatic way of looking at the universe, to Deleuze, can get us out of this rigid way of thinking of philosophy in terms of hierarchies and history in terms of it being this linear thing that progresses from beginning to middle to end. And instead we can understand, our systems of ideas are often massively interconnected and that history is not some single line of progression but instead many different histories all progressing and regressing at extremely different rates.

But just to illustrate how impossible it is to nail Deleuze down like we’ve tried to nail philosophers down in the past, despite all of this talk about the rhizome, he still has no problem at all with the tree. He thinks trees as well are incredibly important when it comes to understanding human ideas.

We’ll talk about why at the beginning of next episode. Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.