Comments for Ethics to Politics in a Thousand Plateaus: Agency Without Subject
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Hillin
Comments for “Ethics to Politics in A Thousand Plateaus: Agency Without Subject”
Hawkins’s paper I think accomplishes something that is no small task: reading Deleuze and Guattari’s cosmology, not only as an ethics and politics, but also using their cosmology to argue that their position is closer to Kant and Aristotle than it seems. I appreciate the author’s willingness to engage D&G with two figures in philosophy (that Deleuze especially) complicates or problematizes elsewhere. I would also like to say that Hawkins is to be lauded by their lucid prose. Indeed, the author unpacks many of D&G’s complicated concepts in a clear and insightful manner which by and large preserves the nuances of D&G’s text.
However, I myself would like to problematize the way in which the author brings D&G, Kant and Aristotle together, particularly by the use of the concept of the body without organs (BwO). I seek to complicate the ways in which Hawkins draws out the ramifications of comparing D&G to Kant and Aristotle, which means I deal less with the ways in which Hawkins reads D&G, and more the way we can think through the manner in which Kant, Aristotle and D&G converge, and diverge, perhaps even “encounter” each other.
I am first and foremost concerned with the way in which the paper defines ethics, and indeed the “proper production of the BwO” (11). Hawkins rightly notes that D&G refer to their ethics as an “ethology”, a term borrowed in part from the biologist Jacob von Uexküll. Indeed, for D&G and Deleuze elsewhere, an ethics will be constructed around a body and “its capacity to create” (11). I take it then that if we can read an ethics into, or from, the concept of an “ethology” D&G’s ethics is one centered around what it means to be an animal. That is, their “ethics” is constructed around a body’s capacity to affect and be affected, no matter the body (like that of tick, as is their example in TP). But what exactly makes this an ethics? Hawkins tells us that because a body is defined by its capacity to create, and the BwO is “a body with maximal capacity to create” (11) then “the proper production of the BwO is an ethical activity…” (11). I would like to pause and consider, yet again, what makes this an “ethics”? And what could make the production of a BwO “proper”? D&G aren’t so helpful on this point, as much of their own language elides or avoids talk of “proper”, “well”, “bad” or even more generally “ethics”. I should note too that Hawkins says the full BwO is our “goal.”
Ethics, then for D&G, paraphrasing and reading Spinoza, is coming to know bodies by their affects, and interactions and reactions with other bodies. It seems then that perhaps an “ethics” will be the ability to hold open and create new connections and affects of a body with other bodies. That is, an ethics (like Spinoza) that seeks to increase the power, or potential of a body, and give it the ability to form/unform itself without hierarchy, division, lack, or seeking some kind of transcendental law or guarantee. We should do well too keep in mind, then, that an ethology qua ethics will include non-human and non-linguistic bodies. In Spinoza Practical Philosophy Deleuze notes that an ethology is about the composition of bodies such that “a body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea” (127). I bring that in now to signal that comparing D&G to Kant would have to ignore that the BwO applies to kinds of beings which Kant could never consider as ethical.
But is the above a sufficient reason to claim that there are “bad” BwOs and “proper” BwOs? Indeed, in what sense is the “full BwO” “our goal” (13), as Hawkins puts it?I feel the need to at first justify why I am making such seemingly pedantic remarks: the language of proper, good/well, and bad don’t seem to have much of a place in D&G’s cosmology, or their ethics as we are defining it here.A Deleuzian cosmology is 1. not about whether or not a force is good or bad, but whether or not the forces are active or passive, fast or slow; 2. it is not whether or not we create a “proper” BwO, but perhaps, to borrow from his works on Spinoza, an “adequate” BwO. So, 1. Hawkins does well to talk about the active, becoming nature of the BwO 2. If we shift from talking about the “proper” construction to an “adequate” construction of the BwO we might be able to elide any of the moralistic connotations, while salvaging the material effects by which a BwO is constituted. That is, when Deleuze reads Spinoza’s adequate idea, it is an idea that contains in it the various casual relations to other ideas. An adequate idea is a true idea, and express another idea as its cause (SPP 74). That is, we come to understand a totality of a network of ideas, as expressed and caused ultimately by God/Nature. How can this help us talk about the full BwO? On 161 in TP D&G interestingly enough talk about how to become a BwO without stratifying too much, and without emptying the body of its organs completely. It seems to take “lodging yourself on a stratum” and finding out the various intensities and lines of flight that are offered. That is, perhaps look for/be affected by the various causes and ideas that affect your body and pursue them. Perhaps an adequate, full BwO takes seriously the multiplicitous and labyrinthine network of causes and ideas and creates from there. (I should note that an adequate idea is how Spinoza builds common notions, which is what bodies share, and here is perhaps another avenue of thought to think the BwO.)
But why all the fuss about good/bad, and proper to adequate? And what about goals? I think seeing the full BwO as adequate and not proper might change the way in which Hawkins talks about the function of a BwO. If the function of an adequate BwO is to become an infinite number of ways it doesn’t seem then that we have an Aristotelean function argument, in which, “an object is good… to the extent that the object performs its function well” (12) then it doesn’t seem becoming can be said to be either good or bad, or function well. One perhaps becomes adequately as one creates and shapes a BwO. There is no purpose or function to the BwO but a functioning—a becoming. The full BwO then perhaps won’t be our “goal”, but is perhaps reaching the plateau, the famous “And and and…” that beginsTP. It’s hard to say if it’s a goal, as it is supposed to function infinitely, clash, collide and lead to other bodies, other possibilities.
But what are we to do with the comparison to Kant that Hawkins makes? Here I would like to perhaps say that the notion of adequacy is also helpful. The comparison to Kant is that the Kingdom of Ends is something compatible with D&G’s cosmology, because we see the becoming of BwO as within a polity, because it takes place in their cosmology and all things seem to become together, such that they form connections. That is, as Hawkins I think rightly notes, is the “tying together [of] a community, a polity” (16). If we perhaps also use adequacy here we can see that an adequate, full BwO sees how all BwO become together and cause one another, and express one another. That is, it expresses a multiplicity that is constantly forming. But is this the same as the kingdom of ends? I hesitate to follow Hawkins here fully because while there is something to the idea of a group of rational beings governed by themselves, as a “systematic union of multiplicities through common laws” (16), it is hard to see how being governed by rationality itself can fit into the Deleuzian cosmology, and further, how one can read multiplicities into Kant’s concept of the individual. Is an individual a multiplicity for Kant? Even if we grant replacing Kant’s autonomy with D&G’s, how does the kingdom of ends effectuate forces? Allow for a body to become many? Hawkins doesn’t tell us; Hawkins does overcome the continuity thesis regarding constitutive principles, but not the individual itself.
Finally, how does Kant’s ideal work in the cosmology? Hawkins argues that the status of the kingdom of ends as an ideal means that we can glimpse, or see it rarely effectuated, as the becoming between the two planes of organization and consistency, because as an ideal it would never be a real endpoint. But what if we saw the kingdom of ends as an abstract machine? That is, an idea that seems to draw boundaries and work on the very material world we become in? The ideal seems transcendental; the abstract machine of the kingdom of ends would then become immanent to the world.
Perhaps we should ask not how Deleuze is similar to Aristotle and Kant, but how can we proliferate Kant and Aristotle’s own thinking? That is, how do we make Kant and Aristotle into many Kants and Aristotles, something Deleuze himself doesn’t do?
Thank you.