Review: Freedom and the Politics of Desire: Aporias, Paradoxes, and Excesses

Author(s): Keith Ansell Pearson

Reviewed work(s):
Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality by G. A. Cohen
Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom by Thomas L. Dumm
Deleuze and Guatarri: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire by Philip Goodchild
Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? by Philippe van Parijs
Source: Political Theory, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Jun., 1998), pp. 399-412
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191843
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REVIEW ESSAY
FREEDOM AND THE POLITICS OF DESIRE
Aporias, Paradoxes,
and Excesses
SELF-OWNERSHIP, FREEDOM,
AND
EQUALITYby
G. A. Cohen.
Cambridge:
Cambridge University
Press,
1995. 277
pp.
MICHEL FOUCA ULTAND THE POLITICS OF FREEDOM
by
Thomas L.
Dumm. Thousand
Oaks,
CA:
Sage,
1996. 168
pp.
DELEUZEAND GUATARRI: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE POLITICS OF
DESIRE
by Philip
Goodchild. Thousand
Oaks,
CA:
Sage,
1996. 226
pp.
REAL FREEDOM FOR ALL:
WHAT(IF ANYTHING)
CAN JUSTIFY CAPI-
TALISM?
by Philippe
Van
Parijs.
New York: Oxford
University
Press,
1995.
322
pp.
These four books indicate that
political theorizing
in the
English-speaking
world is in a
healthy
and
lively
state and that new
conceptual
tools for
working
through
the anxieties and uncertainties of our late modern times are not
lacking.
With the
exception
of van
Parijs,
the books under review are keen to
place
the notion of
freedom,
as inherited
by
us from both the liberal and
Marxian
traditions,
under
suspicion.
It is
probably
Nietzsche who best
captures
the sense of disorientation
many political
theorists
currently
feel
about their inheritance
(Dumm
makes much of the seriousness of Nietzsche's
"death of God" thesis with its
vertiginous
descent into the
abyss).
The
experience
of nihilism refers to the
experience
of a
disjunction,
in which our
actual
experience
of the world and the
conceptual vocabulary
we have at our
disposal
for
making
sense of it no
longer
fit
together.
As is well
known,
Nietzsche's
response
to this
predicament (not necessarily modern)
was to call
for a revaluation of all
values,
subjecting
our
metaphysical
and moral con-
cepts
to a
"supreme
self-examination." This
experience
of
nihilism,
which
exists in excess of the
opposition
of
negative
and
positive,
or
good
and
bad,
seems to define well our troubled
contemporary
sense of
freedom,
and it finds
POLITICAL
THEORY,
Vol. 26 No.
3, June 1998 399-412
? 1998
Sage Publications,
Inc.
399
400 POLITICAL THEORY / June 1998
articulation,
albeit in
very
different
ways,
in these books under review. In the
last hundred or so
years,
we have seen a revolution in
thought
take
place
in
the wake of the modem masters of
suspicion (the unholy trinity
of
Marx,
Nietzsche,
and
Freud),
and once this
trajectory
of
thought
is enhanced with
the likes of
Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault,
and
others,
the
question
can no
longer
be avoided: what is the
status,
in both the
ontological
and
axiological
dimensions,
of such a central and crucial notion in our mental
landscape
like
"self-ownership"?
It is
impossible
to remain naive or
complacent
about the
status of this
notion,
the one that is
perhaps
definitive of the
triumph
and
tragedy
of the
West,
but also the one that has been
placed
in
peril by
the new
postmetaphysics.
The link between the event of nihilism and the
calling
into
question
of the value of
self-ownership
lies in the fact that nihilism
signals
the end of our
anthropocentric
naivete,
in which the human was
posited
as
the
meaning
and measure of all
things.
Furthermore,
the notion of an
autonomous
agent
in
possession
of miraculous
powers
of
autoproduction
and
in control of its own
destiny
has been undermined
by key trajectories
of
modern and late-modem
thought,
which have
sought
to show the heterono-
mous determination of
subjectivity,
whether these determinations take the
form of
history,
technics,
the transcendental
unconscious,
or
capital.
It is with
these
thoughts
in mind that I shall
approach
the books I have been asked to
review.
Thomas Dumm has written what is on the whole an excellent book on
Foucault for the
"Modernity
and Political
Thought"
series edited
by
Morton
Schoolman. It reveals a
scholarly intelligence
in
possession
of a nuanced
late-modern
sensibility. Anyone
who has
any
doubts as to the
lasting
bril-
liance of Foucault's
thought,
and its relevance to
political theory,
should read
this first-rate
piece
of work. For what comes across most from Dumm's
skillful
reconfiguration
of his
oeuvre,
is the sense that here was a
philosopher
of
great daring, courage,
and
integrity
who made one of the most
original
and
provocative
contributions to the
way
we think about our lives in the twentieth
century.
Foucault was a thinker not afraid to take
risks,
and who never
remained
complacent
about his own attainments in
thought.
He was a
"minor" writer in Deleuze's sense of the
word,
that
is,
a thinker who never
analyzed
the
marginal
and
dispossessed
of
society-madmen, delinquents,
prisoners, perverts,
and the homeless-from the
superior
moral
standpoint
of the
majority,
but who
sought
to
tap
into their often silent and autistic voices
and to utilize the
experience
of the minor so as to arrive at a more
dynamical
and
dangerous conception
of
freedom-dangerous
in the sense that it lives
in
excess,
esteems
transgression,
and
engages
in
self-experimentation.
This
is not so much an aestheticization of the
ethical,
a
charge frequently
and
lazily
Pearson / REVIEW ESSAY 401
leveled at Foucault's late
work,
but more of a nonhuman
(or overhuman)
ethics. Dumm shows that Foucault was committed to the construction of a
set of
practices
in which
self-experimentation
can be cultivated
"beyond good
and evil." Such
practices engage
in excess and
transgression
but do not
eschew concerns with
"responsibility"
and commitment. The
emphasis
is on
learning
the
meaning
of these notions
through
lived
experiences
where the
identity
of the self is not taken as
given
and where self and other come into
being through processual
interaction. In Foucault's
transgressive philosophy
of the
Outside,
the other is to be treated as one's
"consuming passion."'
As
Deleuze wrote: "To eat and to be eaten-this is the
operational
model of
bodies,
the
type
of their mixture in
depth,
their action and
passion,
and the
way
in which
they
coexist with each other."2
Dumm's
study
will make an ideal introduction for
anyone
new to Foucault.
It has been
deftly
constructed,
it is written with
care,
precision,
and
passion,
and it succeeds in
enabling
the reader to embark
upon
a radical
self-questioning
concerning
the notion of freedom. The book is divided into four
chapters.
The first
chapter lays
out the
question
in the context of a consideration of our
liberal and Marxian
heritage.
The second
chapter applies
the
problematic
of
freedom to the
question
of
"space," dealing
with the loss of
space,
the sense
of new
spaces
such as
cyberspace, utopian space,
Foucault's
heterotopias,
and it contains a
superb
critical
reading
of Isaiah Berlin's canonical and
much-cited
essay
on the two
concepts
of
liberty.
This
part
of the book should
be set
reading
for those theorists trained in the
analytical
tradition and who
champion, blindly
and
naively,
the cause of
good
sense and common sense
in
philosophical thinking.
His basic
argument
contra
Berlin,
to whom Dumm
is
remarkably
charitable it should be
noted,
is to insist that the
assumption
of
a neutral
space
of freedom
(viz.
Berlin's
argument
in favor of
negative liberty)
betrays
the inherent
instability
of such a
space
when valorized as an absolute
category.
The third
chapter
is devoted to an
exposition
of one of Foucault's
most seminal texts
Discipline
and
Punish,
while the fourth and final
chapter
considers what new senses of freedom
might
be
possible
after the demise of
the
disciplinary society
and locates in the Holocaust
writings
of Primo Levi
a model for a modern version of the care of the self
(it
was
possible
to cultivate
practices
of freedom even in the death
camps).
Dumm's text is not without
problems.
He has a
tendency
for the
pithy,
which,
at
times,
tested this reader's
patience
and which allowed the
quasi-
existentialist voice of the author to arrest the flow of the
imaginative exposi-
tion,
such as when he
brazenly
declares at the end of the book that "a world
without domination is the telos of
genocide" (a
sentence that is too
pithy
for
its own
good).
This kind of
homespun philosophy
is not to
my
taste,
but it
may
be fine for other readers. He also runs the
danger
of
simplifying
or
402 POLITICAL THEORY / June 1998
eviscerating
the
challenge
of Foucault's
conception
of new ethical
practices
by making
it far too
palatable,
for while these
practices
are indeed intended
to
display generosity
toward the "Other" or otherness that is both inside and
outside of
oneself,
it also needs to be
acknowledged
that such
practices
cannot
escape
the dimension of
cruelty.
The Foucault that
emerges
from this
probing
study
is a
deeply
historical thinker but not a historicist. While
exposing
the
contingent
and
open
nature of social
practices
and ethical
norms,
Foucault
always
held that sites of resistance and
self-overcoming
were locatable within
power relationships;
indeed,
for
him,
transgression
is never
simply
an
escape
but
always
an
entirely
contextual and relational affair. The "care of the self'
advocated
by
the late Foucault
requires
no 'hard' notion of the
self,
the self
is
always
a
fragile
achievement,
engaged
in a fluid
becoming,
a
processual
'self-overcoming (this
is the
paradox
of Nietzsche's doctrine of 'how one
becomes what one 'is': the self 'is'
nothing
other than its
becoming).
Dumm
succeeds in
showing
the extent to which freedom for Foucault is
always
situated and
situational,
constrained
by
social relations and
involving
the
mediation of external forces. The forces of the "outside" are never
fully
present
or
determinable,
and so serve to
guarantee
that the self is
compelled
to
always
live
beyond
itself.3
Any nonutopian
vision of freedom for
Dumm,
therefore,
must
comprehend
the constitutive
powers
that situate it.
Dumm has conceived his
re-working
of Foucault and freedom as
making
a
positive
contribution toward a revitalization of liberal
theory.
But what
transpires
is a
major testing
of our liberal
heritage
in which
many
of its
fundamental notions are found
wanting.
His
critique
of Berlin could
quite
easily
be extended to once-called
"postmodern"
liberals such as Richard
Rorty:
"In
presenting space
as
neutral,"
Dumm
writes,
"Berlin makes it the
ground
of freedom. To establish this
space
as the
ground
is to render it outside
of contestation or
struggle. Space
is uncontestable as a neutral
ground
to the
extent that one is
prevented
from
questioning
its
production
or
recognizing
that the
production
of
space
is
always already
an architectural
enterprise" (p. 48).
In
short,
the liberal
conception
of
freedom,
as articulated from Berlin to
Rorty,
is incoherent and devoid of
any
real
meaning
or substance. Because of their
failure to
appreciate
the
importance
of contest and
struggle
in the ethical
praxis
of
freedom,
liberals end
up positing
a
non-politics
of freedom
(hence
the
significance
of the title of Dumm's
book).
Of
course,
legitimations
of the
liberal
conception
of freedom
frequently
take the form of a historical
defense,
defending,
for
example,
the
sanctity
of the
private
individual
against
the
totalitarian threat of the modern State
(in
Rorty's
late-modern
liberalism,
this
takes the absolutist form of
stating
that the
practices
of
private
ironic
self-creation can never be reconciled with the demands of
public
freedom).
But these historical
arguments simply
serve to
highlight
the
largely
reactive
Pearson / REVIEW ESSAY 403
and noninventive character of the liberal
conception
of freedom. As Nietzsche
noted,
liberal institutions and values cease to be liberal as soon as
they
are
attained. This is the
great paradox
of liberalism-it harms and
endangers
freedom.
G. A. Cohen's reasons for
challenging
liberalism are motivated
by
differ-
ent concerns and
by
a different
political agenda.
He does not so much want
to entice us to
question
the value of
self-ownership
as to
encourage
us to
jettison
it
altogether.
The book is
composed
of eleven
chapters,
four new ones
and seven
previously published
between 1977 and 1992. In his introduction
to the
collection,
Cohen
provides
a frank and informative account of his own
coming
of
age
as a moral and
political philosopher.
For the first third of his
intellectual
life,
he was a
straightforward
Marxist of the economistic school
for whom all
questions
of value and
morality
were
nothing
more than reified
and
obfuscatory epiphenomena.
In
short,
for this kind of
Marxist,
morals are
not worth the time of
day
or
night, being
no more than a
pastime
for
apologists
of the
bourgeois
status
quo,
with
any
earnest
inquiry
into morals
simply
standing
in the
way
of authentic
revolutionary praxis.
Attention for the school
of economism is focused on a
revolutionary
transformation of the social
relations of
production
and the
emancipation
of the
technological
forces of
production
for the benefit of the whole of
society.
The
great
socialist world-
society
is seen to
emerge automatically
and
spontaneously
from this eco-
nomic revolution.
Cohen no
longer
believes this. He construes this collection of
essays
as
representing
the summation of his second intellectual
career,
which has seen
him
engage
with liberal
theory, including
eminent liberal
philosophers
like
Robert
Nozick,
concerning
the
superior
merits of
equality
over
liberty
and of
socialism over
capitalism.
Awoken from his
dogmatic
socialist slumbers
by
the likes of Dworkin and
Nozick,
Cohen has set out to
argue
the case for an
ethical socialism that is
apposite
to the concerns of late-modem citizens who
exist amidst the ruins of the
great political ideologies
of the modern
period.
He holds that the values of
equality, community,
and human self-realization
in concert with
others,
can no
longer
be taken as unexamined or undemon-
strable. I am not in a
position
to
say
whether the second Cohen is an advance
over the first one
simply
because I have a different
conception
of
capitalism
and its
beyond
than does he and have no commitment to a
legitimation
of
any
particular
set of moral values. One cannot doubt the
intelligence
and
clarity
that he
brings
to bear on such fundamental issues as freedom and
equality.
Cohen believes that the chances of
equality
now
gaining
the
high
moral
ground
have never been better
owing
to the
ecological
crises that
many
see
as
taking
over our habitation on the
planet
and
dominating
the
political
horizon of the
twenty-first century.
Such crises have for Cohen called into
404 POLITICAL THEORY / June 1998
question
once and for all Marxism's commitment to a communist
utopia
in
which the
promised
land would offer abundance for all
readily
and
accessibly.
It is not
surprising
that such a model of social life had no sustained
conception
of the
political (there's
nothing
to contest in a land without need or
want).
We now need a different vision in which we learn to live in
symbiotic
relation
with the resources of the
planet
and share them
equally.
This
requires
a loss
of faith in
any extravagant, pre-green
materialist
optimism:
"A
(supposedly)
inevitable future of
plenty
was a reason for
predicting equality. Persisting
scarcity
is now a reason for
demanding
it,"
Cohen writes in his introduction.
Of
course,
one could accuse him here of
committing
a naturalistic
fallacy
to
the extent that he ends
up depoliticizing
such a crucial
question concerning
resources:
"plenty"
and
"scarcity"
do not exist
independently
and ahistori-
cally
of the
mediating
realms of economics and
technologies,
so to talk of
them in the
way
that he does is to treat them as reified abstractions. One
wished he hadn't
completely jettisoned
his former materialist
training
in the
desire to
engage
with our dear moral
philosophers
over the value of certain
values.
Of
course,
Cohen does
recognize
that his
argument
in favor of an
ecologi-
cal socialism faces a
major problem.
Is not a class
society,
or some kind of
society
of
divisions,
inevitable under conditions of
scarcity?
In other
words,
how can one
argue
for socialism from
ecological premises?
Cohen's
response
is to disown Marx's
optimism
about material
possibility
while at the same
time
disowning
his
pessimism
about social
possibility
under conditions of
nonabundance and self-denial. The
major
task of a Marxian
political
thinker
then is one of
defining equality
in a context of
scarcity.
In
fact,
the
emphasis
in this
argument
should not be on
scarcity,
I believe. For what is clear is that
Cohen's denial of the "abundance thesis" of
old,
pre-green
Marxism is as
much,
if not
more,
a moral
argument
than it is an economic one. He holds the
position
that we have no
right
to continue
exploiting
and
exhausting
the
resources of the
planet
in the
way
that we
allegedly
are. It is not
simply
that
we can no
longer rely
on
technology
to fix
things
for us as the Marxism of
old led us to believe. Cohen's
ecological
socialism commits him to a
position
of
securing
a
tight
control over
technology,
in both its inventions and its
directions. If not an old-fashioned Marxist
any longer,
Cohen remains an
old-fashioned humanist for whom man
enjoys supreme
moral value on the
planet.
So while I have no
great problem
in his
calling
into
question
the notion
of
self-ownership,
I do have
major
problems
with his eco-socialist vision
since it could all too
easily generate
a new moral authoritarianism that
might
prove just
as
damaging
to the
dangerous
and excessive cause of freedom as
any previous ideological
movement,
such as that of the liberal and libertarian
crusade of
self-ownership.
Pearson / REVIEW ESSAY 405
Cohen finds
self-ownership
a
pernicious
value not for Foucauldian ethical
(or supra-ethical)
reasons but for
ecologico-moral
ones. He
rightly
locates
with the old Marxism a latent and concealed commitment to the same liberal
principle
of
self-valorization,
where the sense of self and its various fulfill-
ments are rendered
unproblematic
and its
importance
taken for
granted.
The
libertarian
principle
of
self-ownership simply
states that
every person enjoys
over him- or herself full and exclusive
rights
of control and
use,
owing
no
service or
product
to
anyone
else that
they
have not contracted to
supply.
Of
course,
such a
conception
of the self or human
being
is
instantly recognizable
as a fiction. There is
nothing God-given
about
it,
and it rests on a
complete
depoliticization
of social existence. It is the
metaphysical position par
excel-
lence,
offering
neither a transcendental deduction in Kant's sense of a critical
philosophy
nor a
convincing empirical
or historical account of its own
naturalistic status. Cohen is also
right
to
point
out that: such a
conception
of
the individual rests on a
complete
disavowal of the autonomous character of
nature itself: nonhuman
things
are
granted
value
only
to the extent that
they
serve the function of
satisfying
individual human needs and desires. Self-
ownership
is an invalid
principle
for Cohen because it disavows both the
mediation of nature and substantive social relations. He admits that his
essays
may
not
strictly
refute the thesis of
self-ownership,
but he
hopes
that
they
will make it seem a lot less attractive to
many.
This is a
strong
collection of
essays
that will
appeal
to
anyone
who has
been
following,
or
participating
in,
the debates that have taken
place
over the
last decade and more
surrounding
the
competing
claims of liberalism and
communitarianism,
involving
defenders of
liberty
and
champions
of
equality,
and
requiring
novel
thinking concerning
distributive
justice.
Cohen does a
lot of
good
work in
exposing
on the social and
political
level the hollow
character of the thesis of
self-ownership.
But he has
failed,
with this reader
at
least,
to make his alternative eco-socialism
any
more attractive than the
liberal
gregariousness
it seeks to
supersede.
Of the books under
consideration,
van
Parijs's
is the least
philosophically
interesting
and
inspiring.
No new
conception
of freedom is
offered,
and the
value and valorization of the
principle
of
self-ownership-that
it is a desirable
end-in-itself and that we all know what it means-is
simply
taken as self-
evident. This
may
be an unfair criticism to make since the author's concern
is not with the finer
points
of
ontology
but with
making
a
pragmatic
contri-
bution to
policy
studies. As the book's inner
jacket
has it: "The book is not
just
an exercise in
political theory,"
but seeks to show what the "ideal of a
free
society
means in the real world
by drawing
out its controversial
policy
implications."
Of
course,
this
begs
all the
questions:
what is
just
an exercise
in
political theory?
And what is this talisman
being dangled
in front of us that
406 POLITICAL THEORY / June 1998
goes by
the name of "the real world"? Since
Parijs
does not dwell on these
points,
neither will
I,
but
swiftly
move on to
give
the reader a sense of what
he means
by
"real freedom for all."
Parijs opens
with two uncontroversial theses:
one,
that
capitalist
societies
are marked
by unacceptable inequalities
of
power
and
opportunities;
and
two,
that freedom is of the
greatest importance.
One of the central tasks of the
book, therefore,
is to
provide
a concerted and credible
response
to the
libertarian
challenge
that would claim that these two convictions are
mutually
exclusive and that one cannot have both real
liberty
and
equality
for all. If
we value
freedom,
must we
necessarily give
our
blessing,
whether with or
without a blind
eye,
to the
inequities
of the
present system?
Is this the
price
we
pay
for our freedom?
(It
is
certainly
not the
price
those who are excluded
from the
pleasures
of this freedom
pay.)
For
Parijs,
real libertarianism entails
"real freedom for
all,"
and his
project
is best seen as an
enlightening
contribution to a left-libertarianism. The
opening chapter
considers the
question
of freedom in relation to
ideal-type
models of
pure
socialism and
pure capitalism. Chapter
2 unfolds the claim that the
regime
best suited to
attaining
the left-libertarian ideal is one that is able to
afford,
and
implement,
the
highest
sustainable unconditional income
"subject
to the constraint that
everyone's
formal freedom should be
protected." Chapters
3 and 4 then
attempt
to
respond
to the most
powerful objections
that could be raised
against
the
pursuit
of such an ideal.
Chapter
5 tackles the
problem
of
exploitation, aiming
to refute the
objection
that the thesis of "real freedom
for all" cannot serve as a model of social
justice simply
because it insuffi-
ciently
takes into account the
proper
basis for an "ethical"
critique
of
capitalism, namely,
an
outright
condemnation of
exploitation.
The final
chapter
concludes
by exploring
the relative merits of
capitalism
and socialism
as social
systems
best able to actualize the author's ideal. Needless to
say,
given
the author's
pragmatic
bent,
the
chapter
does not resolve the issue either
way
but
keeps
the debate
open, preferring
a reformist line that commits itself
not to
any
outdated model of
political
revolution but to
presenting
a
system-
atic ethical case for radical reform of the
existing system through
the
introduction of an unconditional basic income.
The most
pertinent question
to ask in the context of this review
essay
would seem to be this: What does
Parijs exactly
mean
by
"real freedom for
all"? What
exactly
does "freedom" denote in this schema? The first
thing
to
note is that
by
freedom
Parijs
means
something
neither
political
in the
praxial
sense nor
something
ethical in the Foucauldian sense. For
Parijs,
both formal
freedom
(the
freedom
guaranteed by property rights)
and real freedom
(to
be
defined
shortly)
are
aspects
of individual
freedom,
neither of which has
any
relation to collective freedom
(whether political
or
ethical) except
in an
Pearson / REVIEW ESSAY 407
instrumentalist sense. These two senses of freedom
constitute, therefore,
a
solely "negative liberty"
if contrasted
with,
say,
the
liberty
of the ancients.
"Real freedom" is the freedom to do whatever one wishes to
do,
rather than
the freedom to
practice
what is dictated to one
(the
"freedom" of moral
duties,
for
example)
or
autonomously
chosen
preferences (this
is a
significant point
since it does
give
a
degree
of
levity
to "real" freedom that would alarm
any
self-respecting moralizing liberal).
Formal freedom
presupposes
the
right
to
self-ownership,
while real
freedom,
it
logically
follows for
Parijs,
deals with
the constraints
upon
a
person's purchasing power
and even their
genetic
makeup.
Real freedom thus entails not
simply having
the
right
to do what one
might
want to do but
equally having
the means to achieve what one wants to
do.
However,
this
conception
of real freedom is
qualified-for
obvious
practical
reasons of limited resources and the
possibly
exorbitant demands
that would be
placed
on social
provisions-by stating
that the
opportunities
for
accessing
the means for
doing
what one
might
want to do are distributed
in maxim in fashion: "Some can have more
opportunities
than
others,
but
only
if their
having
more does not reduce the
opportunities
of some of those
with less. In other
words,
institutions must be
designed
so as to offer the
greatest possible
real
opportunities
to those with the least
opportunities,
subject
to
everyone's
formal freedom
being respected" (p. 5).
Of
course,
on the model of a socialist
philosopher
like
Cohen's,
the real
freedom
proposed by Parijs
must remain
irredeemably capitalistic
since it
never
questions
the
ontological
and
ecological primacy
accorded to self-
ownership.
It comes close to the old Marxian
fantasy
of
maximizing
the
opportunities
of individual freedom for all
draped
in new
garb.
In
fact,
Parijs's
vision of freedom is
resolutely
and
consistently antipolitical.
He
pours
scorn
at the
compromise
idea that one could combine the freedom of
self-ownership
with full democratic
ownership
of
public goods
and
utilities, indeed,
public
ownership
of the external world in
general.
For
him,
this is incoherent since
the individual self cannot
possibly
be said to be free in
any
"real" sense if he
or she cannot
breathe, eat, move,
and so on without the
prior approval
of the
political community
that owns
everything
in the world
except
the self.
Parijs
is
good
at
attacking
the incoherence of these kind of half-hearted
conceptions
of
freedom,
but his own
arguments
are so
ontologically impoverished
that
his thesis on real freedom for all ends
up being
both dull and
singularly
unattractive. In the face of such a
platitudinous conception
of the
self,
one
positively
embraces the
experimental-abnormal
even-freedoms cele-
brated
by
the likes of Foucault. The
great irony
here is that defenders of
Parijs
would
probably argue
that a Foucauldian
practice
of freedom is
nothing
more
than the
fantasy
of an elite or deviant
minority (from
Athens to San
Francisco)-
whereas,
in
fact,
it is this
conception
of so-called real freedom for
all,
in which
408 POLITICAL THEORY / June 1998
all the
emphasis
is
placed
on
private ownership
of the self and on the
private
ownership
of external
objects,
which would serve to
guarantee
that the
self-owned individual
gets
shored
up
in a static and sterile world of
private
fantasy. Parijs
at one
point
accuses normal libertarians
(the
ones he calls
"rights-fetishists")
of
being
seduced into
offering
a moralized
conception
of
freedom without
any
real substance or extensive
validity.
But he himself is
guilty
of
offering
both a moralized and a
privatized conception
of freedom.
In the
end, therefore,
for all its relevance to concrete
policy making
(and
I have no doubt that it will
prove
to be
highly
relevant in this
domain),
it is
the lack of
ontological imagination
that
seriously impairs
the value of
Parijs's
intellectual labors. He writes as if
modernity,
let alone
postmodernity,
had
never
happened
and we could talk about freedom and
self-ownership
as if it
were 1789. This is not to
say
that he does not
recognize
the
peculiarly
modem
status of the thesis of
self-ownership,
since he
clearly
does. What is
missing
from his
theorizing
is
any recognition
of the
philosophical
revolution of
modernity
and
postmoderity,
which,
as we
approach
the end of the twentieth
century, might legitimately
lead in the direction of some kind of
eco-socialism,
or, alternatively,
in a more "schizo"
direction,
where
practices
of freedom are
taken to a
place
where,
to
quote
from two authors discussed
below,
"We ain't
seen
anything yet."4
All of this
brings
us to Deleuze and Guattari and their novel and discon-
certing attempt
to
map
out the
complex relationship
between
capitalism
"and"
schizophrenia.
Deleuze and Guattari's two volumes on this
topic-Anti-
Oedipus (1972)
and A Thousand Plateaus
(1980)-remain highly
controver-
sial
(there
would be
something wrong
if
they
ever became
readily
assimilable
into academic
practices),
and as
yet, they
have not had
any major impact
on
Anglo-American political theorizing (there
are the odd
exceptions,
such as
the work of William
Connolly
who has
recently begun
to use their notion of
a rhizome to rethink the
politics
of
space
and
territory).5
In his introduction
to the Politics
of
Desire,
Philip
Goodchild
provides
the first
systematic study
of their work from the
perspective
of social and
political thought.
He has
sought
to
carry
out the unenviable task of
making
their ideas
comprehensible
to a wide audience while at the same time
remaining
faithful to the mobile
and intensive character of their lines of
thought.
The fact that he has
only
partially
succeeded in this task is no small achievement.
Deleuze and Guattari are
preeminently
social and
political
thinkers since
they
construe "desire"-the fundamental
concept
of their first collaborative
work, Anti-Oedipus-as
a
nonpersonal
force
functioning
on
every
level of
life from the
biological
to the social and the
technological.
Their utilization
of the notion of "desire" can
readily
be
interpreted
as
metaphysical,
but the
intention is to be
rigorously
materialist. For
them,
desire is
always
to be
Pearson / REVIEW ESSAY 409
thought
of in terms of the
neologistic couplet "desiring-machines."
The
reality
of desire
precedes any
distinction between
subject
and
object,
or
between
ontology
and
epistemology (production
and
representation).
As
Guattari once said in an
interview,
it is
everything whereby
the world and its
affects constitute us outside of ourselves and in
spite
of ourselves. It is
frequently
associated with some kind of undifferentiated
magma,
but this is
to miss the
significance
of the
couplet "desiring-machines,"
which is de-
signed
to
capture
the idea of
permanent
flow and of a
reality
that is
constantly
dividing
and
inventing
itself anew. Machines-whether
biological
functions
or
technological
artifacts and
prostheses-serve
to
arrange
and connect flows
of
production.
Moreover,
they
do not
recognize
distinctions between
persons
or
organs,
and between material fluxes and semiotic ones
(all
codes contain
a
margin
of
decoding
intrinsic to them because of the fact that
they possess
a
surplus
value of code: chromosomal
DNA,
for
example).
It was a concern with the
politics
of desire that informed Deleuze and
Guattari's
critique
of
antipsychiatry
and their call for a
politicization
of
psychiatry
in
Anti-Oedipus.
For them the
experience
of
breaking
down is to
be an
experience
of
breaking-through.
Their
argument-contra
the likes of
the
antipsychiatrists
of the
1960s,
such as R. D.
Laing
and David
Cooper-
was to insist that this
experience
be
intimately
linked
up
with the social and
historical
reality
of
capitalism
so that to
separate
mental alienation and social
alienation is to
depoliticize
the
schizo-experience.
The
decoding
and deterri-
torialization of flows is what defines the
process
of
capitalism
in terms of its
fundamental
reality,
its innermost
tendency,
and its external limit. At the same
time,
because
capitalism
is an economic
system
based on massive
antipro-
duction
(that is,
producing
immense
surpluses
that then
get
directed into
increased
policing,
militarization, bureaucratization,
and
general regulation
of
society),
it is
subject
to a
major
reterritorialization of the codes it has
decoded and the flows it has unleashed.
Capitalism constantly
falls back onto
the invention of neo-archaisms and
maintaining
the
security
of
juridical
subjects (the
fiction of
persons
and
things)
so as to ward off the ultimate
tendency
toward absolute
schizophrenia
(it should be
apparent
that this term is
completely
de-medicalized
by
Deleuze and Guattari and refers to the social
experience
and
political praxis
of self-transformative
desire).
For Deleuze and
Guattari, therefore,
an individual is to be conceived as
always caught up
in
assemblages
of desire made
up
of
heterogeneous
com-
ponents; indeed,
an individual cannot be
thought
outside of these relations.
As
such,
the individual is never the locus or center of action. And
yet
Deleuze
and Guattari wish to valorize
freedom, but
always
the freedom valorized is
the nonhuman and extra-human
kind,
which
belongs
to desire. Here one
might
take,
for
example,
as an
analogy
with the human individual of modern
410 POLITICAL THEORY / June 1998
thought,
the
biological organism.
Deleuze and Guattari would claim that an
organism
is
always
the function of the frame in which it is
encoded;
it
enjoys
no
privileged
existence
independently
of our
cognitive mapping
of the
phenomenon
of life. Their later
conception
of the
rhizome,
for
example,
contests the idea that there exist
living systems
that are
informationally
closed. A rhizome is a network of
overlapping
territories and molecules that
functions as an
open system,
both
entropically
and
informationally,
and that
designates
a constructive feedback
loop
between
independent
information
lineages (whether cultural,
linguistic,
or
biological germ lines).
As
opposed
to conventional
phyletic
models, therefore,
that of the rhizome demonstrates
the extent to which
exclusively
filiative models of
evolutionary phenomena
are
dependent upon exophysical system descriptions
that are
simply
unable
to account for what is novel or creative within
evolutionary dynamics,
whether the
system
one is
treating
is
biological
or social. Conventional
frames thus
capture only
a small
part
of the
possible
information that
assemblages
are able to
express.
Goodchild has divided his "Introduction" to Deleuze and Guattari into
three
parts, dealing respectively
with
"knowledge," "power,"
and the "libera-
tion of desire." In
part
1,
he
provides
a useful outline of the
principal
philosophical
influences on Deleuze
(notably Spinoza,
Nietzsche,
and
Bergson),
while in
part
2 there is an instructive and
intelligent
discussion of
the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the
major
intellectual move-
ments of the
century,
such as
structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism,
psy-
choanalysis,
feminism,
and
postmodernism.
The book concludes with some
speculations,
some
fanciful,
others
incisive,
on ethics and
"becoming-
Deleuzean," which, according
to
Goodchild,
involves
leading
a full and vital
life so as to
escape
the
repetitive
movements of the death-instinct
(this
claim
is based on a
very poor reading
of Deleuze's
re-working
of Freud's infamous
death-drive).
In
many ways
his book offers a
refreshing
and
invigorating
account of Deleuze and Guattari's
politics
of
desire,
and it does so I think
largely
because of its insistence that their
project
was a
positive
one
designed
to come
up
with novel
images
of
positive
social relations that would unleash
desire from its liberal
stranglehold, releasing
freedom from its
privatization
and sanitization in
bourgeois society.
The ethical
guidelines
to be found in
Deleuze,
and
they
are indeed
nothing
more than
that,
are for Goodchild the
expressions
of a vitalist and
optimistic philosophy,
in which each wound
incurred in the trials of life "constitutes a
problem
for an affirmative ethos-
one has to discover how to turn its sad
passions
into active
joys" (p. 208).
Throughout,
Goodchild has striven to
produce
a
reader-friendly
text.
However,
his
attempt
to be
overly
accessible
by
not
being
too technical
backfires at times. For
example,
he
appends
at the end of the book a
glossary
Pearson / REVIEW ESSAY 411
of
key
terms to
guide
the untutored reader
through
the thickets of the Deleuze
and Guattari rhizomatic tunnels and
passages
of
thought,
but this has been
done in a far too cavalier and
idiosyncratic fashion,
and the end result is
quite
abominable. There is no substitute for technical
precision.
Deleuze and
Guattari's
categories
need to be treated
carefully
since
they
function in
quite
specific
contexts and
always
have a material dimension. The
concept
of
"deterritorialization" means
something quite specific
in relation to the
logic
of
capitalism,
and
equally something specific
in relation to their under-
standing
of the rhizomatic evolution of hominid
species (where
it serves to
explain
the transition to
bipedalism
via the deterritorialization of a back
paw
into a
free,
locomotive
hand).
In Goodchild's
glossary,
deterritorialization is
risibly
rendered as
meaning "leaving
home and
traveling
in
foreign parts."
No doubt the author is
thinking
of Deleuze and Guattari's
predilection
for
nomadic forms of
ethological
and ethical existence over
sedentary
ones,
but
even on this level the
description
is
lacking
in
precision:
need one
point
out
that
traveling
in
foreign parts
also
happens
to be a favorite
pastime
of fascist
brigades?
The
politics
that
emerges
from the
challenge
of Deleuze and Guattari is
clearly
a
politics
of
freedom,
but this is freedom conceived in a
way
that has
never been articulated
by
the tradition of modern
thought,
whether
liberal,
Marxian,
or libertarian. In contrast to a
politics
of control or
regulation, they
advocate a
politics
of desire that allows for the
emergence
of informal
networks or rhizomes between forms of
life,
human and
nonhuman,
in order
to
generate
maximum freedom of
diversity
and
novelty-hence
their cham-
pioning
of nonhuman
transsexuality
and
polysexuality
as well as their interest
in the
symbiotic possibilities opened up by
new
cybernetic technologies.
But
the celebration of the new
by
them is
always
done in the context of a social
critique: why
is
it,
they ask,
for
example,
that the immense
processual
potentials brought
into
being by
the revolutions in information
technology,
biological engineering,
telematics, robotics,
and so on lead
only
to a revitali-
zation of the
politics
of control and
manipulation?
How does one resist an
oppressive
and
stupefying
mass-media culture and the infantile
politics
of
consensualism that
goes
with it? Postmoder liberalism can
only
serve to
guarantee
a machinic solitude for these new life-forms since it cherishes and
values
only
an
impoverished
and
infantilizing subjectivity.
To
bring
this review to a
close,
then. Few can doubt that we have reached
something
of a
postmodern impasse
in our
conceptions
and
practices
of
freedom. Ethics and
politics
have
perhaps
never been more
demanding
for
us moderns since we now find ourselves
compelled
to think about new
values,
visions,
and vistas without the
support
or aid of transcendent
principles.
But
these
books,
each of which is
progressive
in its own
way,
make one confident
412 POLITICAL THEORY / June 1998
that from out of the ruins of the
present,
new forms of
thought
are
possible,
even as
they emerge necessarily entangled
with the
old,
and that from out of
a new
acknowledgment
of human
finitude,
a new vital
dwelling
on the
planet
may
be attainable-not
necessarily
for
all,
not
necessarily
for all and
none,
but at least for the mutant children of the future whoever (and
whatever)
these
children turn out to be.
-Keith Ansell Pearson
University
of Warwick
NOTES
1. For
insight
into Foucault's
passion
for ethics and his ethics of
passion,
see the
ground-
breaking essay by
David
Boothroyd,
"Foucault's
Alimentary Philosophy:
Care of the Self and
Responsibility
for the
Other,"
Man and World 29
(1996):
361-86.
2. G.
Deleuze,
The
Logic of Sense,
trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale
(London:
Columbia
University
Press, 1993).
3. Deleuze's
study
of Foucault is
particularly good
at
unfolding
and
enfolding
the theme of
"outside" in his work. See G.
Deleuze, Foucault,
trans. S. Hand
(London: Athlone, 1988).
4. This
phrase
is
repeated
three times in Deleuze and Guattari's
Anti-Oedipus.
5. This
may
not be true of work in
political theory being
done down under in Australia. Paul
Patton's awaited Deleuze and the Political will be
published by Routledge
in their
"Thinking
the Political" series in 1998. For a feminist
application
of Deleuze's ideas to the social and
political,
see Moira Gatens's excellent collection,
Imagining
Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Cor-
poreality (New
York:
Routledge, 1996).
Keith Ansell Pearson is director
of graduate
research in
philosophy
at the
University of
Warwick
(England).
His most
recently published
books include Deleuze and
Philosophy
(ed.)
and Viroid Life
(both published by Routledge). Routledge willpublish
his next book,
Deleuze and Germinal Life:
Essays
on
Evolution,
Ethology,
Ethics and Literature in June
1998.