Johns Hopkins University Press

In May of 2012, a group of 90 scholars from around the world gathered at the Kaifeng International Deleuze Conference held at Henan University in the ancient capital of Kaifeng City in Henan province. This two-day conference was jointly sponsored by Henan University and The University of New South Wales, and organized by Professor Jihai Gao, Professor Paul Patton and a team of academic and administrative staff and students from Henan led by Dr. Jing Yin. The first of its kind to be held in China, this conference marked a new phase in the translation of Deleuzian thought and concepts into the diverse languages and cultures of East Asia. Speakers from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan presented alongside those from Europe, North America and Australia.1 The following papers are a small selection from the many productive encounters that occurred at this event. Presented by speakers from a variety of disciplines, they address a range of issues in Deleuzian political theory and its application to China.

In her essay “Immanent Sociality: Open-Ended Belonging,” Lili Lai suggests that contemporary China is marked by a plane of immanence that spreads itself across the country in ever-new ways. A key element of this plane is what Lai terms “village sociality”. In contrast to the hegemonic discourse prevalent amongst Chinese intellectuals that presumes an opposition between the public (or collective) and the private (or individual), She argues that “village sociality” proves the existence of social networks that are neither public or collectivist, in the traditional sense of Chinese socialism, nor private or individual, as is commonly understood within liberal democracies. Lai does this by exploring the practices and experience of a Chinese village that she takes as being indicative of this phenomenon. Like many villages in China, Shang village in Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Province, is a “kong xin cun” (hollow village) – a village in which young adults are almost entirely absent. They have left to work as migrant laborers. But as Lai explains, far from leaving the village behind, these young adults remain deeply embedded within a village-based network of people and practices that governs much of their lives. Through examples such as marriage and the medical care system, Lai shows how Chinese society functions through a form of sociality that is tacit, intrinsic, immanent and largely directed by informal ties and practices produced at village level. While this sociality is not individualistic, it is equally distinct from the regulatory applications of the State and its concern for collective governance. Although it might be assumed that such a “village sociality” in China is threatened by broader processes of modernization, Lai’s research finds that the bonds of “village sociality” have not been broken, but rather modified and renewed in an open-ended and immanent manner akin to Deleuzian becoming.

Min’an Wang similarly suggests that present-day China could be aptly described by processes of becoming, and in particular the productivity of desiring-machines, that envelop the country. Such, however, has not always been the case. In his paper “The Chinese Cultural Revolution, Deleuze and Desiring Machines”, Wang considers the extent to which the Cultural Revolution was intended to inhibit the production of desire. As he argues through an analysis of party documents and statements from individuals who experienced this tumultuous period, the Cultural Revolution marked a new phase in the Chinese socialist revolution, insofar as its objective was to alter people’s “innermost being”. By 1966 the bourgeoisie in China had been more or less overthrown. Much of its cultural capital, however, remained alive and well. Feudal conventions, furthermore, continued to dominate cultural practices, necessitating in the eyes of Mao Zedong a radical transformation of Chinese daily life. While it is true that much of the Cultural Revolution’s attack on traditional and bourgeois daily life operated at the level of material objects, Wang suggests that the real or ultimate target of this movement was in fact desire. Indeed, as Wang notes, the Chinese word for “desire” almost completely disappears from Chinese society during this period. After outlining this target, Wang proceeds in his paper to discuss the relations, both intended and eventual, between the revolution against desire and economic productivity, before concluding with some remarks on the subsequent reforms of Deng Xiaopeng. For Wang, Mao’s death sparks a process of “opening-up” that reactivates desiring-machines – a process that continues to intensify today as China itself comes to resemble a giant Body-without-Organs.

The relations between capitalism, productive processes and State capture also lie at the heart of Craig Lundy’s paper “Why Wasn’t Capitalism Born in China?: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Non-Events.” As Lundy notes, in a manner that echoes Wang, the answer to this question lies in the way that the State inhibits the processes required for its full emergence. To flesh out this answer, he explicates Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “State” and “capitalism” and the relation between them. However, he goes on to argue that while there is important work that can be done in analyzing how the State stymies capitalism in the context of China, of equal significance is a consideration of the question itself: why do Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly pose this question, and others like it? An appraisal of the instances in which this question is invoked reveals that Deleuze and Guattari often raise it in order to illustrate the significance of a particular kind of question – namely, the kind of question that calls into consideration the contingency of history and the history of contingency. After discussing Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to the question of capitalism’s non-emergence in China, Lundy goes on to explore the manner in which this question – or more specifically, questions of this kind – might suggest a philosophy of non-events that, although related to Deleuze’s notorious notion of the Event, is arguably irreducible to it.

Two other contributions to this Symposium explore further the thematic of capture and control. William Bogard explains in “Control Surfaces and Rhythmic Gestures,” that power functions in control societies as the modulation of digital interfaces – for example, between a digital touch screen and a finger. Rhythmic gestures, themselves free creations, permeate such interactions and their surfaces. Indeed, gestures are the interfaces that compose surfaces, according to Bogard. But in our world today these gestures have been largely captured or territorialized within technical assemblages that contour the space of becoming and curtail new collaborations; they close in on themselves and become dimensional rather than directional, nothing more than a self-referencing modulation. Resistance is thus demanded. And how is it to be achieved? – by producing counter-rhythmic gestures that connect the body/screen interface, the control surface, to a gesture outside itself. This, one might surmise from Bogard’s essay, is the principle task before us in the digital age of information.

Philippe Mengue argues in “The Idiot in Societies of Control” that Deleuze follows Foucault in describing control as a positive form of power that has for its aim the management of life. This power is not opposed to liberty, but constitutive of it. From mobile phones to GPS locators, instruments of control are also means to facilitate freedom and deterritorialisation. And yet it is equally clear, as Bogard and others have pointed out, that enslavement conjoins this liberation in various ways, giving rise to new dangers. The questions are, how are we to resist, and what new forms of resistance are necessitated by these new dangers? Mengue’s response relies on Deleuze’s affection for the literary persona of the Idiot in texts such as “Bartleby or the Formula” in Essays Critical and Clinical. Mengue describes the way in which the Idiot for Deleuze gives rise to a new form or image of subjectivity. Insofar as to act politically is to decide, to make choices, Bartleby’s formula (“I would prefer not to …”) pushes away or suspends any affirmation of effective choice. For Mengue, this means that the figure of Bartleby represents the undetermined, which is to say, the virtual. The Idiot therefore expresses the introduction of indetermination or suspension, the creation of a “zone of indeterminacy,” that can itself be seen, if not as a political act then at least as an act with consequences for politics. The creation of such zones of indeterminacy is a “non-causal” condition of the emergence of something new, of an event. For Deleuze, according to Mengue, the politics of the event necessarily implies a politics of indetermination, as this is expressed in the persona of the idiot. The political task then is to find new ways of creating such spaces of indetermination within our contemporary democratic spaces of control.

The final contribution to this Symposium, Jae-Yin Kim’s “Deleuze, Marx and Non-Human Sex,” speaks to the political ontology that operates throughout much of this Symposium. The objective of Kim’s paper is to shed light on the immanent ontology shared between Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Marx’s Manuscripts from 1844. Of central concern to this project are the concepts of desire and the unconscious in each of these two texts. According to Kim, nearly all previous political philosophies have wrongly considered desire and the unconscious to be human, and have furthermore postulated humanity as a-historically given. In their evasion of such presumptions, Deleuze and Guattari make significant use of Marx. Kim also notes through close textual analysis how Deleuze and Guattari draw from Marx in order to advance several other key arguments in Anti-Oedipus, such as their critique of the anthropomorphic representation of sex, the subject-object dichotomy, and their theory of the unconscious as an orphan that produces itself. The result is an important piece of scholarship that deepens our appreciation and understanding of the Marxist origins of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought.

Craig Lundy

Craig Lundy is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Transformation Research, University of Wollongong. He is the author of History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and editor with Daniela Voss of At the Edges of Thought: Deleuze and Post-Kantian Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). His research explores the intersections of historical, political and social theory, and in particular the role that history plays in processes of transformation. Craig can be reached at craiglundy@gmail.com

Notes

1. Details of the Conference, including the full program and photos, are available at http://deleuze.henu.edu.cn/index.php/c_home/over_view

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