Society as Pure Difference

Introducing Deleuze and Politics

O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t. — William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I

To live a fulfilling life we require a vision for how we can think about life and its possibilities, how we can explore life’s possibilities, and decide for ourselves what is a fulfilling life.

And this involves deliberation on what motivates us in life, what we can do, what we might do, at the limit.

Running through all of this is the premise that we have the ability, the freedom and opportunity, to pursue and implement our vision of a fulfilling life.

The Political Dimension of Fulfillment

This in turn is inherently a question of politics, and in particular, social and political theory.

In order to pursue our vision of a fulfilling life, we require an environment that supports and promotes such activities.

A society that provides us with the freedom to pursue our vision of a fulfilling life is one that does not force us to live such that we are prevented from pursuing our conception of the good; or indeed, forced to live somebody else’s vision of a good life.

The question of having the freedom to pursue a fulfilling life is a question of how society might be organized: how it orders its social and political institutions, whether such ordering enables all individuals to exercise the freedom to pursue their own fulfillment, and whether such a society can adapt to changing needs.

We require a political outline of a society that ideally and practically enables its citizens to conduct their lives in accordance with their vision of what is fulfilling.

Approaching Deleuzian Political Theory

In the context of a vision inspired by Gilles Deleuze, of what it means to live a fulfilling life, we are compelled to ask:

How might society be arranged so as to maximize each person’s ability to exercise their active powers, to act upon their desire to create the new, to realize their inherent being as becoming?

Becoming is personal and social: we enact desiring production by connecting with others in society; other machines, other multiplicities, and other people.

As I have mentioned in prior articles, this process is driven forward at the level of the virtual, as a process of the folding, unfolding, and refolding of difference-in-itself.

But the product of this process at any point in time, the static snapshot of it at any given stage, is the actualization that is ourselves and the social and political formations we inhabit.

Liberal Theory

Deleuze has a very different vision of society than that of traditional liberal political theory.

Liberal theory traditionally relies on a concept of society in which individuals consent to be governed, but only on terms that reflect their autonomy as individuals.

Deleuze changes the focus from individuals to machines, a term he uses to reflect a more mobile unit that exercises power in society.

Deleuze explicates a vision of society that is consistent with his philosophy of difference: a society that is a changing actualization of virtual processes, territorializing lines of flight, deterritorializing social formations, reterritorializing, and so on.

No Prescription

But absent from Deleuze’s work is a detailed political account of how society might be optimally organized in order to reflect his ontological, epistemological and ethical philosophy.

And it remains an open question whether Deleuze’s philosophy can be understood in the context of liberal theory; whether it is possible to incorporate into Deleuze’s philosophy concepts from liberal theory, and vice versa.

In this next series of articles, I will attempt to outline an adaptation of liberal political theory that is consistent with and supports Deleuze’s vision, as well as attempt to explain how we can account for and evaluate this adaptation within Deleuze’s philosophy.

Rawlsian Liberalism

We will explore contemporary liberal thought’s most extensive and exhaustive theory, that of John Rawls’ “political liberalism” and “justice as fairness.”

We will see that Deleuze’s philosophy of difference is consistent with a Rawlsian vision of society; and that Rawls’ political philosophy can be incorporated into and reinterpreted in accordance with Deleuze’s philosophy.

Rawlsian and Deleuzian thought both support a view of life as one of experimentation and creativity based in pure difference.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!

Tomas

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