Reflections on Time and Politics

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

P R E F A C E A N D A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S i began this project in early 2004, shortly after a five-month visit by Professors William E. Connolly and Jane Bennett to my department at Exeter University. I benefited greatly from the papers they delivered and from our many lengthy discussions. Bill, who came to Exeter as a Leverhulme Visiting Professor, also led an engaging ‘‘Time and Politics’’ research seminar , which gave me the opportunity to carry out my first in-depth reading of Bergson’s Creative Evolution and to present a paper on Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, which has developed into the center of this book. At the time I was working—or at least claiming to be working—on a book-length study of Deleuze. However, despite the breadth of Deleuze’s thought and my strong intellectual debt to it, the focus on a single thinker was becoming increasingly unsuitable for the diversity of the avenues I wanted to explore. This diversity, which now included a number of issues around the nature of time and its relations to politics and ethics, also made the standard book format of five or six chapters undesirable. I wanted focused components that were shorter than chapters but more sustained than aphorisms, and that could be loosely organized as a series of explorations of or engagements with a broad range of topics and thinkers. After a period of reflection on my experiences in Bill’s seminar and how I could develop the thoughts it inspired in me, the idea for this project and its format came to me. Hence the title: Reflections on Time and Politics. This project combines the interest in time that developed as a result of Bill and Jane’s visit with a long-felt dissatisfaction with contemporary political philosophies that see identity being formed through constitutive exclusions . To my mind, these accounts end up holding the consolidation of identity to be contingent and ephemeral, yet also to be the sine qua non for political thought and action. While this approach to identity is understandable and, in certain areas of politics, often useful and effective, I have long found it limited. This has led me to ideas associated with Deleuze and Guattari ’s micropolitics and Foucault’s care for the self, which seem to me to go in a very different direction from most other postidentity political theory. It has also led me to the thesis from Deleuze’s late 1960s writings that holds x Preface and Acknowledgments identity to be a simulation or optical illusion. I am well aware that Deleuze moved away from this terminology. Nevertheless, it is appropriate to the thesis I will be advancing here: that identity and fixed markers, which may be considered natural and pregiven or contingently constructed but indispensable , are surface effects of difference. Identities and fixed markers, I want to say, are like patterns on the surface of water, which appear fixed when seen from a great distance, such as from the window of an airplane in flight: their stability and substantiality, in short, are a matter of perspective. As the pages that follow will try to demonstrate, to hold that identities are semblances of stability is not to suggest that they are unimportant or dispensable. Indeed, they structure a great deal of personal, social, and political life. Nor is it to say that identity can be easily modified. Just as a shadow on a wall, being cast by an object located elsewhere, cannot be changed by attempting to alter the image directly, so identity must be modified by adjusting the flowing relations of difference that project it as a fixed center. And the case of identity is more complicated because its source is not a solid object, making the task, again using the water metaphor, more akin to shifting currents that can easily slip around barriers, return to their original paths once these barriers are removed, and produce similar patterns even when they are successfully altered. That identities and fixed markers must be approached indirectly through the often hidden and subtle dynamics that constitute them is what makes micropolitics and practices of the self so important; that these same identities appear to be more significant than they are is what makes the undertaking so challenging. Identity is certainly characterized by endurance over time, but it is an error...