I. Introduction. 504 Reviews. Nathan Widder (2008) Reflections on Time and Politics, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Transcription

1 504 Reviews Nathan Widder (2008) Reflections on Time and Politics, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. I. Introduction Nathan Widder s book, Reflections on Time and Politics, exemplifies Wittgenstein s remark in the Philosophical Investigations that the work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose ( 127). Widder s purpose is the liberation of pluralistic political thought that is, those perspectives on politics that are concerned with the autonomy of difference from a very powerful and well-entrenched conception of identity. His assemblage of reminders revolves around the problem of time. Widder is concerned that many forms of contemporary political thought have taken their cue from thinkers like Deleuze, Foucault and others like them, but have failed to fully absorb the lessons that these thinkers offer. The lesson at stake here has to do with the conceptions of time that these thinkers work out, all of which have radical consequences for the concept and not just the concept but the very possibility and actual status of identity. The radical critique of political identity, whose emergence can provisionally be tied to Nietzsche s thinking, has contributed to an unprecedented political awareness among many individuals and groups in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The political problematisation of identity has taken many forms. For example, we see identity politics, in which particular concrete identity formations are the basis and subject matter of political struggle itself; political liberalism, which asks individuals and groups to abstract away from substantive identity claims and participate in formal consensus-building procedures; communitarianism, which takes its cue from Hegel s idea of a shared ethical substance; and so on. Identity politics has been very important, and has provoked retrenched efforts insofar as thinkers like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze have picked up on Nietzsche s insight and have analysed the processes through which particular identities are imposed on individuals and groups. Of course, with Deleuze, as with the other thinkers that Widder praises in Reflections on Time and Politics, identity is a synthetic effect Widder uses the term simulation, fully aware of what that means after Deleuze s reversal of Platonism generated by the dynamics of difference and repetition. Yet, says Widder, this very important insight about identity has not yet been fully taken on by many contemporary

2 Reviews 505 thinkers: If identity remains in some way necessary to our understandings and selfunderstandings, it is only as a marker useful for coordinating and organizing certain aspects or levels of life, and only when these are considered in abstraction. It seems to me that identity is still held to be more than this in many political and philosophical circles aspiring to escape from, or at least displace and circumscribe, metaphysics, essentialism, and transcendence. I would go so far as to say that the exposure of identity as a simulation is a lesson from Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze that often goes unappreciated even by theorists who draw inspiration from them. The result, I believe, is that too often identity is held to be historically contingent and fluctuating, yet still indispensable for politics, ethics, meaning, and thought. Considerations of the concrete structure of time, however, can open up another path. (Widder 2008: 12) Despite the innovations of Foucault and others, many radical conceptions of political struggle have not quite shaken some metaphysical prejudices. The discovery that identities are dynamically composed multiplicities rather than self-grounding things-in-themselves is undercut by an overemphasis on what Foucault referred to as sovereign power, on the problem of who acquires and wields power. To put it another way, some ways of understanding political struggle influenced by Foucault and others remain transfixed by the mediating power of personae, whether the latter are individualistically or collectively individuated; in Deleuze and Guattari s terminology, we are faced with attempts at radical politics that still have trouble escaping the molar register. This is not to say, for example, that Iran s Green Revolution, which coalesced around Mir-Hossein Mousavi and opposed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad s presidency, was misguided because it focused on the molar aspects of the struggle and did not address the molecular register of dynamic force relations that give rise to identifiable power blocs. Rather, what Foucault, Deleuze and others have proposed is that molar struggle is not the only kind: in order for despotic regimes to be established, entire arrays of complicated actions need to be papered over and abbreviated versions of events have to be accepted. In other words, there is no question of a macropolitics without a micropolitics that addresses force relations that tend toward the abstract, the anonymous and the subindividual. Many contemporary political approaches that take their cue from radical twentieth-century thought, however, still tacitly presume a conception of identity that has not yet freed itself of the horizon of substance metaphysics. Widder suggests that an analysis of the problem of time can help us escape that horizon.

3 506 Reviews II. The Problem of Time and Politics For Widder, everything hinges on the relationship of time to change or movement. He begins by noting that recent debates in philosophy have seen a return to the problem of time. Philosophical projects searching for ways to consider more affirmatively how philosophy can be practiced and how the human self or subject can be conceived today, in conjunction with the impact of profound changes related to globalization and the information age economy, which have blurred both real and conceptual boundaries and made speed a central factor of contemporary life... [have] produced a renewed interest in time as an active force of change, contingency, and novelty. (1) One need not look very far to confirm this statement; today, we hear all about rhythms and durations; we are used to discussing social phenomena with temporal vocabularies. Time s multiplicity, manifesting itself in the coexistence of different tempos and velocities of time, is now used to account for complex and ambiguous processes of contemporary life and to outline excessive forms of speed that modern societies seek to control (ibid.). The association of time with a multiplicity of durations is a great innovation, but also poses a problem that drives Widder s line of inquiry here. This often explicit focus on time s movement... seems problematic. Perpetual movement is certainly time s first and most obvious trait... [m]oreover, emphasizing the dynamism of both time and the processes occurring in it has obvious advantages for a pluralist political thought that aims to challenge identity-based politics by demonstrating both the contingent, incomplete, and fluctuating nature of identity and its slippery materiality. Finally, stressing time s movement helps foster a more natural link between philosophy and the physical sciences... [p]rivileging time s passage, however, seems to me to be both analytically incomplete and inconsistent with respect to the principal philosophical sources inspiring this move. (2) The principal philosophical sources in question all have one important thing in common: multiplicity as a first principle. Widder is right, moreover, to question ways of thinking that claim inspiration from, say, Deleuze and that fail to take the thought of multiplicity to its full extent. It is not that there are x number of Deleuzian accounts out there that do not adequately engage a Deleuzian conception of time, though. Rather, the failure of these positions lies in their failure to stop depending on a

4 Reviews 507 conception of identity to act as a ground for political thought. Widder knows that the articulation of multiplicity as first principle, and its attendant radical critique of identity, cannot avoid going through a radical conceptualisation of time. Wisely, he chooses to privilege the problem of time in this book because its clarification demonstrates that there is and can be no escape into identitarian thinking for forms of political thought that claim to follow Deleuze and others. The chief question concerning time, according to Widder, is: is time fundamentally subordinated to movement and change in other words, to duration and thus to extension or is it rather to be thought of as the structure according to which movement, change, duration, temporal extension and so on come to be through syntheses of multiplicity? If we are to take up Deleuze s thought, we have to follow the latter path, and this is Widder s decision. It is not that time s flow is unimportant, but it is neither primary nor foundational... [t]herefore, despite the important advances the recent interest in time has brought to pluralist political philosophy, this work sees the need to take a further step back and consider time as a static structure or synthesis that ungrounds movement, including the movement of time. (3) For the purposes of this review, I am going to use the term extension to gather up the various senses that Widder uses movement, change and so on because I think that the prejudice he draws out comes down to the implicit or explicit idea that we ought to be able to find something like an elementary particle of being. Another way to put it might be to say that this prejudice in favour of identity leads us to search for minimal indivisible units that guarantee sense, meaning, coherence and so on. In terms of political thought, it amounts to the enduring idea that there is a subject or, as Alain Badiou puts it, that there are always some subjects that is not the synthetic effect of difference and repetition. As Widder correctly suggests, many political thinkers continue to look for the minimal substantiating term. For example, in Johanna Oksala s Foucault on Freedom (2005) we find Foucault s insights wedded to a phenomenological conception of the body, an anonymous body structured through the normatively significant life-world, with its unique language and tradition. It is the familiar life-world that is normatively relevant to us. It is the world that our body intends and spins around us... [o]ur horizon of anticipations is structured in accordance with the intersubjectively handed-down forms of apperception. (Oksala 2005: 148)

5 508 Reviews Likewise, if we look at Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri s work, such as 2004 s Multitude, multitude itself becomes the minimally acceptable individuating principle; it is an internally different, multiple social subject whose constitution and action is based not on identity or unity (or, much less, indifference) but on what it has in common (Hardt and Negri 2004: 100). Lastly, Jürgen Habermas, who is well aware of the challenges of Nietzsche and Foucault, but who has misread both the stakes and the consequences of those challenges and turns away from them, conceives of a communicatively generated intersubjectivity upon which rests the possibility of and call for engagement. In each of these examples, we find a minimally self-identical res extensa of sorts that acts as the abstract subject of political thought; in each of these examples, moreover, we find an ostensible rejection of the old category of identity, of a thing-in-itself that would replicate and sustain classical metaphysics, with all of the latter s pitfalls and untenable claims.yet, in each case, the problem of identity is reconstituted at the level of the individuating term used to support a pluralist politics. Each of these systems of thinking relies on an element of substantive identity, despite having disavowed the latter. In each case, the status of political thought depends on whether or not we have identified the correct res extensa, the right subject, substance or substrate. I think that Widder is right to point out that this is a widespread tendency in contemporary thought, and I think that he is also right to insist that it is a problem for thinkers, like Oksala or Hardt and Negri, who explicitly draw inspiration from Deleuze and Foucault. It is no less a problem for someone like Habermas, who takes a much different path but who nonetheless considers his thinking to be postmetaphysical. On such views, the particular character of the subject in question frames the inquiry. This adequately self-identical subject is always the basic minimum individuating term necessary for the proper approach to politics. But, as Widder s work reminds us, this conception of identity only obtains on the condition that time is primarily flow. If flow is time s essence, then any particular identity is reducible to its own duration, which reintroduces the classical distinctions between substance and property, accident and essence, and so on. A conception of time based on extension tends to persuade us that the abstract continuity of extended things is primary and substantial. The impression that follows is that, for whatever practical problematic we take up, the appropriate abstract identity is at play, and our responses to the problematic, and even the way we frame the problematic in the first place, must be answerable to the abstract subject in question; it

6 Reviews 509 must be shown that something is at stake in the problematic that is analogous to or that resembles the abstract substrate. But according to a conception of time that admits of no substantial ground in the form of abstract identities that underpin particular concrete subject formations, there is no such thing as a minimal res extensa. Despite the consequences of following philosophies of multiplicity to their logical conclusion there remains, even in many pluralist approaches to politics, a considerable whiff of transcendence that poses an obstacle for radical critique. To address this problem, Widder reminds us that Deleuze and the other thinkers he praises in this book all work out conceptions of time that are autonomous with relation to conceptual schemes grounded in extension. Beginning with a reading of Aristotle s Physics, in which Widder begins clarifying a conception of time that is excessive in both its infinite backward and forward extension and its foundational discontinuity, making it harmful to any telos (21), we are treated to eighteen meditations on the meaning of an unreserved commitment to the principle multiplicity. III. The Book Reflections on Time and Politics falls, very roughly, into three divisions. Chapters 1 through 6 deal with a pure philosophical elaboration of time, beginning with Aristotle and proceeding to Deleuze s reception of the untimely in Nietzsche s thinking. Chapters 7 through 13 address the issues of ego formation, the unconscious and sense, and feature very interesting discussions of psychoanalysis in chapters 12 and 13. Chapters 14 through 18 are overtly political, and culminate with a discussion of Foucault that is entirely appropriate and welcome, since one finds a complex temporal logic in Foucault s work that bears directly on his philosophico-historical investigations and that is crucial to understanding his thinking. I find Widder s discussion very helpful, because Foucault is a molar agent through which the thought of contemporary political struggle is frequently approached, and is a privileged mediator for a thoroughgoing treatment of non-identitarian thinking. Moreover, the problem that Widder wishes to address in his book is very closely related, in my view, to the inadequacy of many influential critiques of Foucault. The image of Foucault finding a pervasive domination in every facet of social life is well known. This view has underpinned not only a lot of theory in North America, among Foucault s detractors as well as his supporters, but also many forms

7 510 Reviews of concrete ethico-political criticism and activism, in which everything plays out as the struggle against an ineradicable despotism that plagues the soul; this tendency is compatible with a certain Christian legacy as well as with a certain multicultural liberalism that Slavoj Žižek has taken to task in the most uncompromising manner. Yet an awareness of the way that temporality works in Foucault s thinking helps dispel this image, and thus to my mind Widder is entirely right to conclude this book by discussing Foucault, since all of his work incorporates the radical perspective on time that Widder picks up from Deleuze and works out. Another chapter that I really like is chapter 9, on Incorporeal Surfaces. Here Widder provides a solid account of Deleuze s reversal of Platonism, in which the simulacrum, rather than being the parasitical imitator of the forms, embodies positive principles of difference and repetition (106). The simulacrum s dynamics, for Deleuze, produce a phantasm that never corresponds to it because the phantasm cannot copy it well or badly (106). Phantasms, the perceptible effects of the simulacrum, are not the representations of some kind of substance to which they would be in some way analogous; formally speaking, they correspond to nothing, although they are in immanence with the simulacrum. Identity, insofar as it is a residual effect of phantasmatic production, that is, of difference and repetition, is only established through processes of hierarchical differentiation between micro-events, generating the macro-events that belong to the game of representation. From the point of view of pure multiplicity, fields of events are entirely indifferent in themselves, which is to say that the thought of pure difference admits of no concrete distinctions, since the latter obtain only on the condition of a minimally stable identity. To even say something like fields of events, moreover, is already to concede too much to the selection process: there is no subject of politics or subject of history. And this is really the crux of Widder s project: to remind us that, at bottom, there is no subject, that there is nothing of substance upon which identity rests. I found chapters 12 and 13, both on the synthetic production of the psyche, to be particularly helpful, because of the still-powerful impression that there is some kind of ground in psychic life itself, something that would no longer be the effect of difference and repetition. But the account that Widder works out in these chapters undermines the prejudice of a mind whose contents are (at least ideally) perfectly aligned with the offerings of a more or less inert world composed of regular and irregular arrangements that are to be clearly and distinctly perceived. In my view, Widder provides a

8 Reviews 511 welcome rejoinder to the so-called speculative realist thesis of Quentin Meillassoux and some of his colleagues, according to which everyone after Kant, including Nietzsche and Deleuze, falls into the category correlationist for their assimilation of mind to world and vice versa. Widder nicely provides a set of resources for showing the shortcomings of this position when it comes to a philosophy like Deleuze s; here, minds and worlds are no doubt correlates, but they are non-analogous correlates and their relationship is not representational. The relation itself is inconsistent; whatever links there are between psychic agency and its objective correlates is neither pre-established nor analogous. The subject is to be overcome, objects are to be overcome: this is empiricism. The psyche is a surface that develops out of a chaotic world of part-objects (135), an ongoing event composed of events, a disjunction of differences folded into one another and linked through a differenciator, dark precursor, or pure event. As such, the phantasm, relating to external reality at and through the surface, cannot be a good or bad copy of this reality (138). These two chapters, on the genesis of the surface, are helpful companions for Deleuze s Logic of Sense because they provide clear accounts of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein s respective work in relation to Deleuze s encounters with each. IV. Conclusion Reflections on Time and Politics is a very rich book, and there is a lot to like here. I have had trouble picking out passages to get into because every chapter is full of challenging and helpful argumentation, and I could certainly go on at length were it not for space constraints. I do not have much in the way of disagreements with Widder here, and where I might, they are relatively inconsequential. For example, in chapter 15, Discipline and Normalization, he claims that according to Foucault modern society... is disciplinary (158), which is not an unusual claim. For my part, however, I would say that insofar as we can say that there is something like society, the latter has undergone disciplinary becomings: various rationalities have been deployed across innumerable events and have produced changes in the direction of what Foucault calls discipline. I am wary of making a claim like modern society is disciplinary because I am wary of tacitly reintroducing a substance property relation into the mix. But if I differ here, it is a very minor quibble. By no means do I think Widder is inattentive to these difficulties, which are very hard to escape. As Widder consistently points out, there is nothing necessarily wrong with using identity as a provisional, strategic marker; the problem

9 512 Reviews is how to do so without losing sight of the synthetic character of identity formations. I highly recommend this book to readers for its rigour and sobriety. Widder is uncompromising in following the thought of multiplicity to its furthest extent, and pursues all of its consequences for political thought. He offers a much-needed corrective to those who claim to incorporate the work of Deleuze, Foucault and others, but who shy away from taking the logic therein as far as it has to go. Widder has written a very truthful book, and he is to be commended for it. Matthew Furlong University of King s College DOI: /dls References Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: The Penguin Press. Oksala, Johanna (2005) Foucault on Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10 Call for Papers The First International Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference, Taipei, Taiwan The English Department at Tamkang University, the publisher of the internationally renowned Tamkang Review, is pleased to announce that it will be hosting The First International Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference on the theme Creative Assemblages, 31 May 2 June 2013, and, prior to the conference, the Deleuze Camp, May, Creative Assemblages As one of the most important terms in Gilles Deleuze s oeuvre, assemblage refers to the territory of an object along with its own regime of signs and pragmatic system. Yet assemblage also refers to the force of deterritorialisation underlying the structure which is pending to be effectuated so that new connections can be established. In other words, the Deleuzian assemblage is not only a territorial gesture, framing its own territory but also a performative practice of carving out new routes of thinking. Most important of all, Deleuze and Guattari emphasise the epistemological sparks emanating from launching creatively the continual process of territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of assemblages. Yet, where can we perceive assemblages? They are everywhere: human beings, as centers of indetermination, are assemblages of images, with which Deleuze assembles the brain with the screen, the world with the film to expound his philosophy of time. Even virtual assemblages on digital networks ( , Facebook, Twitter) in our quotidian life can be regarded as assemblages. Assemblages can be practical and political instead of just theoretical. In this light, to what extent can Deleuze s philosophical thinking assist us to canvass various assemblages in prospect, and what is the assemblage between us and Deleuze in retrospect? Is it possible for us to theorise the new informatics sensibilia by formulating the dispositif of the horizontal/rhizomatic assemblages? And apart from the superficial/superfluous assemblages, is it possible to build any vertical but not arborescent assemblage? Situating this notion in the contemporary world, we are seeking to form transdisciplinary assemblages in order to respond to and have dialogues with the present predicaments. Possible topics for papers may include but are not limited to: 1) Connections between Deleuze and Guattari s work; 2) Connections among all the different arts, including literature, film, music, architecture, etc. 3) Deleuzian Asian Assemblages; 4) Affect and Asian Aesthetics;

11 5) Image and Thought; 6) Deleuze and Gender; 7) Psychoanalysis and Schizoanalysis; 8) Creative betrayal of Deleuze; 9) Pros and Cons of Deleuze; 10) Ecology with/without Guattari; 11) Digital Folds; 12) Translation as Expression. Although we wait to hear from several invited speakers, currently confirmed speakers include: Jeffrey A. Bell (Southeastern Louisiana University, USA) Ian Buchanan (University of Wollongong, Australia) Hsiao-hung Chang (Taiwan University, Taiwan) Claire Colebrook (Pennsylvania State University, USA) Jiang Yuhui (East China Normal University, China) Kokubun Koichiro (Takasaki City University of Economics, Japan) Patricia Pisters (University of Amsterdam, Holland) John Protevi (Louisiana State University, USA) Anne Sauvagnargues (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France) Kailin Yang (Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan) If you are interested in presenting at this conference, submit panel proposals and/or individual abstracts (maximum 250 words) with your institutional affiliation and a short bio. The deadline for submission of abstracts for the conference is 31 January However, for early notification, you are encouraged to apply by 1 September The conference registration fee is US$180 for regular attendees, US$150 for early birds, and US$110 for students (the subscription fee of Deleuze Studies is in-built), including refreshments and lunch each day. Prior to the conference, there will be a five-day Deleuze Camp. As spaces are limited, registrations will be accepted on a first-come first-serve basis. Applications should include a short bio and a brief statement of one s research interests in Deleuze. The camp registration fee is US$220. The working language of the conference and the camp is English. The webpage of the academic event. tflxcfp/ will be available after 25 March For further inquiry, please contact Professor Hanping Chiu, the organiser, at hp.chiu@gmail.com NOTE: Those who pay the registration fee of this conference can be exempted from the subscription fee of Deleuze Studies if they register for the 2013 Lisbon Deleuze Studies International Conference.