Parallel Lines: Spinoza and Foucault (by way of Deleuze)

 

The pile that I am working through

I think that it is safe to say that Foucault never really got that interested in the revival of Spinoza that took off in France in the late sixties. As far as I can tell the only sustained reference to Spinoza appears in his lectures on the Will to Know, and there in that text, he considers Spinoza much in the same way that Nietzsche did, as someone who named the will to knowledge, but did not criticize or problematize it. As Foucault writes,

"Undoubtedly, there is hardly a philosophy which has not invoked something like the will or desire to know ( connaître ), the love of truth, etcetera. But, in truth, very few philosophers—apart, perhaps, from Spinoza and Schopenhauer—have accorded it more than a marginal status; as if there was no need for philosophy to say first of all what the name that it bears actually refers to. As if placing at the head of its discourse this desire to know ( savoir ), which it repeats in its name, was enough to justify its own existence and show—at a stroke—that it is necessary and natural: All men by nature desire to know ... Who, then, is not a philosopher, and how could philosophy not be the most necessary thing in the world?"

Deleuze argues that philosophers do not often see their proximity to other philosophers. It would then be wrong to let Foucault have the last word on this relation. Pierre Macherey has suggested that Spinoza could be seen as an unrecognized precursor to Foucault. His focus on the institutions of the ancient Hebrew state prefigured Foucault's own assertion that the "soul is the prison of the body." However, it is perhaps Deleuze who suggests a stronger connection through the concept of parallelism. I should make it clear that parallelism is not a good reading of Spinoza, it is a term that Spinoza does not use, and does not adequately represent the relations between ideas and things.  However, one of the things about reading Deleuze, or reading Deleuze productively, is that he forces you to think of other standards other than textual accuracy. His monstrosities of reading might not be accurate, but they are often interesting. I recently returned to Deleuze's Spinoza, or Spinoza through Deleuze, one of my first philosophical loves, but one that I have moved away from in recent years as I have read more on Spinoza. What follows are a few paragraphs in which I try to think through the productivity of Deleuze's engagement with Spinoza. 

Deleuze makes parallelism central to his reading of Spinoza. The order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas. These two attributes are parallel lines, two different expressions of the same substance. They are both immanent expressions of god or nature. Spinoza’s idea of an immanent cause destroys any ontological hierarchy that would put minds above bodies, god above nature, destroying transcendence as an image of thought. Louis Althusser argued that Spinoza’s concept of immanent causality posited an entirely new figure of causality, an alternative to the linear mechanical causality of empiricism or the expressive causality of Hegel. Moreover, he argued that this causality was the unstated presupposition of Marx’s concept of the mode of production. Rather than think the mode of production as a base made up of forces and relations of production upon which there would rest a superstructure of politics, ideology, and religion, situating everything on a vertical axis of causality and determination, it was necessary to think of the mode of production as an immanent rather than linear or expressive cause. As Althusser writes, “…it implies that the structure is immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists in its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects." In other words, everything that could be seen as an effect of a given mode of production is also its cause, the condition of its reproduction. The ramifications of this concept can be seen most clearly in Althusser’s influential work on ideology (itself heavily influenced by Spinoza) ideology is at once an effect of the mode of production, and its apparatuses, but it is also a cause, a necessary condition of the relations of production. Althusser’s transformation of the concept of immanent causality from an ontological or even theological problem, ultimately about the relationship between God and nature, to a social or political ontology, of the relation of base and superstructure, production and reproduction, is the necessary precondition of Deleuze (and Guattari’s) Spinozism, especially as it develops into a social and political theory. 

This influence poses a problem, however, in that is as a concept immanent causality requires an understanding of what the cause is, of what it is that makes it so the order and connection of bodies and ideas are the same. In Spinoza that something is substance, understood as god or nature, in Althusser it is the mode of production, or more specifically the capitalist mode of production. To understand what it is for Deleuze one has to take a detour through Foucault. In Deleuze’s book (and courses) on Foucault, he often writes to produce an ontology that Foucault was not interested in, reading Foucault’s historical studies for an ontology of assemblages, diagrams, and forces. Deleuze focuses on the fact that Foucault’s analysis of power, especially the works of the seventies on prisons, abnormality, and sexuality, analyze both relations of forces, in the architecture of schools and homes, and the emergence of new statements, regarding delinquency, perversion, and sexuality. What strikes Deleuze is that the two series, of the arrangement of bodies and the articulation of statements, relate without determining or expressing each other. “There is a mutual presupposition operating between the two forms, yet there is no common form, no conformity, not even correspondence.” The arrangement of bodies does not cause or reflect the arrangement of ideas, what is called the form of expression, and the arrangement of ideas does not cause or determine the arrangement of bodies, what is called the form of content. They are both independent yet parallel. This is because both can be related back to something else, Foucault did not have a clear term for this something else, although he used terms like episteme, dispositif or apparatus to refer to the total articulation of bodies and things, of spatial relations and relations of knowledge, but often just framed this relation with his own parallelism of power/knowledge. The slash would be both the division and articulation of the two terms, their separation and relation. Deleuze calls this element the diagram or abstract machine that acts as a “non-unifying immanent cause that is coexstensive with the whole social field.” As Deleuze goes onto write, “What do we mean here by immanent cause? It is a cause which is actualized, integrated, and distinguished in its effect. Or rather the immanent cause is actualized, integrated and distinguished by its effect.” Deleuze like Althusser invokes Spinoza’s immanent cause, only in this case it is also read through the two attributes, things and ideas, redefined as power relations and discursive structures, it is a cause that not only exists in its effects, but exists in the differentiation of two different series. Moreover, this cause can itself only be perceived, only be grasped, by reading Spinoza’s ontology through Foucault’s social theory, and vice versa. 

Of course the differences are just as striking and important. Spinoza's Ethics develops an entire ontological argument as to why substance, God or nature, has to be an immanent cause, and why this cause is known by us, in terms of things and ideas, grasped by us under the attribute of thought and extension. Even though there are more attributes than we know (one of the arguments against parallelism). There is nothing like that in Althusser's borrowing of the immanent cause. His argument is that Marx is trying to think a new concept of causality and that Spinoza is his only precursor on this obscure terrain. That is one way of understanding the translation or detour, from the ontological to the social. Foucault is even less inclined to explain why power and knowledge, non-discursive and discursive apparatuses are all that we know and perceive. He is content to demonstrate that every change at the nature of statements, at the nature of knowledge relates to, but does not reflect, a change in the organization of power. 

The detour through Foucault makes it possible to see the way in which this intersection of Foucault and Spinoza, Spinoza read through Foucault, is at work in A Thousand Plateaus. Or, more to the point, it is in A Thousand Plateaus, that one can grasp the extent to which the combination of Spinoza’s propositions of the immanent cause and parallelism become their own social ontology (read through Foucault’s reflections on Power/Knowledge and Hjemslev’s linguistics.) 

 On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away. An Assemblage is an apparatus, defined as both a relation of bodies and a relation of ideas, a body and a mind in Spinozist sense. This formula gets its own historical example, drawn from neither Foucault nor Marx in the next paragraph. As Deleuze and Guattari write, 

 Taking the feudal assemblage as an example, we would have to consider the interminglings of bodies defining feudalism: the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the overlord, vassal, and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their new relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of bodies—a whole machinic assemblage. We would also have to consider statements, expressions, the juridical regime of heraldry, all of the incorporeal transformations, in particular, oaths and their variables (the oath of obedience, but also the oath of love, etc.): the collective assemblage of enunciation. On the other axis, we would have to consider the feudal territorialities and reterritorializations, and at the same time the line of deterritorialization that carries away both the knight and his mount, statements and acts. We would have to consider how all this combines in the Crusades.

La Datcha by Gilles Aillaud and others

From Spinoza, to Althusser, to Deleuze and Guattari, there is a fundamental transformation of what it is occupies the place of the immanent cause. For Spinoza it is ultimately God, or all of nature. For Althusser it is the mode of production that is the immanent cause. Deleuze and Guattari follow Foucault in expanding the definition of this cause beyond the economic aspect to a encompass a diversity and multiplicity of institutions. In doing so they in some sense return to Spinoza, but not the Spinoza of Part II of the Ethics, but of Parts III and IV, and the political treatise, in which politics has to be understood as a relation of bodies (and minds). As Deleuze and Guattari write, 

 We think the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage relates not to the production of goods but rather to a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another. 

 Deleuze and Guattari’s transformation could be understood as completing immanence, as destroying any last remnant of hierarchy, that of God above nature, or base above the superstructure. “An assemblage has neither base nor superstructure, neither deep structure nor superficial structure; it flattens all of its dimensions onto a single plane of consistency upon which reciprocal presuppositions and mutual insertions play themselves out.” There are only bodies and enunciations, nothing more, two parallel lines, defining each assemblage, and the abstract machines that organize them. At this point it would seem that Deleuze and Guattari have departed entirely from any relation to Marx, to reduce everything to bodies and enunciations, a flattened social ontology. However, the determining cause, they thing that defines and articulates these parallel lines of bodies and thoughts, is as Deleuze and Guattari argue, a vertical axis of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari define deterritorialization in terms of capitalisms tendency to transform activities into abstract labor, and disparate and different objects into commodities. By transforming what is qualitative and divergent into what is quantitative and comparable capitalism deterritorializes activities and objects from their place and roles to become interchangeable quantities. As Deleuze and Guattari write: 

 Marx said that Luther’s merit was to have determined the essence of religion, no longer on the side of the object, but as an interior religiosity; that the merit of Adam Smith and Ricardo was to have determined the essence or nature of wealth no longer as an objective nature but as an abstract and deterritorialized subjective essence, the activity of production in general. 

Deleuze and Guattari’s argument with respect to Marx follows and extends the most sweeping lines from the Communist Manifesto that “all that is holy is profaned, all is solid melts into air.” Capitalism is identified with a fundamental problem of deterritorialization. However, unlike Marx and Engels, who saw this deterritorialization working in one direction, as the bourgeois ceasely revolutionized production, globalized production, and transformed all values into marketable values, Deleuze Guattari argued that deterritorialization has as it is necessary counter tendency reterritorialization. As Deleuze and Guattari write: 

 Civilized modern societies are defined by processes of decoding and deterritorialization. But what they deterritorialize with one hand, they reterritorialize with the other. These neoterritorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; but they are archaisms having a perfectly current function, our modern way of ‘imbricating,’ of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resuscitating old codes inventing pseudo codes or jargons … These modern archaisms are extremely complex and varied. Some are mainly folkloric, but they nonetheless represent social and potentially political forces … Others are enclaves whose archaism is just as capable of nourishing a modern fascism as of freeing a revolutionary charge … Some of these archaisms take form as if spontaneously in the current of the movement of deterritorialization …Others are organized and promoted by the state, even though they might turn against the state and cause it serious problems (regionalism, nationalism). 

 In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari continue this line, framing money, labor and rent, as three different deterritorializations, all of which transform fundamentally qualitatively different things, activities, and places into quantitative units. This quantitative comparison is inseperable from a monopolistic appropriation. In the first case, direct comparison reduces the various activities to one homogenous activity, in the case of labor, or the various objects to instances of one homogenous object, in the case of the commodity. The second case, monopolistic appropriation, is not a secondary accumulation imposed upon this comparison but is its necessary precondition. As Deleuze and Guattari write, 

‘Surplus labor is not that which exceeds labor; on the contrary, labor is that which is subtracted from surplus labor and presupposes it. It is only in this context that one may speak of labor value, and of an evaluation bearing on the quantity of social labor, whereas primitive groups were under a regime of free action or activity in continuous variation’. 

 It is the monopoly, the appropriation by force which constitutes the very ground that compares different activities, different objects, making them interchangeable. This deterritorialization is intimately intertwined with capture, with the capital as the monopolistic appropriation is the necessary condition of quantitative comparison. It is also inseparable from reterritorialization, which falls primarily on the state, or the nation. “It is thus proper to State deterritorialization to moderate the superior deterritorialization of capital and to provide the latter with compensatory reterritorializations.” The state is a model of realization of the global deterritorialized axiomatic of capital. In other words, states are situated once in terms of an axiomatic of worldwide flows, their place in the axioms of labor and money, that they realize, or actualize, and this actualization requires them to reterritorialize these flows in terms of nations, people, and traditions. To take one immediate example, the way the nation, and the idea of the nation as being made up an idea shared people or shared history, helps the state regulate the flows of labor. The border, and the nation, are ways of realizing and reinforcing the differences of labor power that traverse it. It is this generalized process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that becomes the “vertical axis” determining and situating the parallel lines of collective assemblages of bodies and statements. If it is possible to say on this point that Foucault makes it possible to transform Spinozist parallelism in to a social and political theory, demonstrating how bodies and ideas, machinic assemblages and collective assemblages, constitute parallel lines actualizing power relations, then it is possible to also argue that an engagement with Marx, with Marx’s understanding of capital as a history of abstraction makes it possible to further develop the ontology. Bodies and ideas, assemblages of content and expression, are not just situated in terms of the specific articulation of power relations, but in terms of the more expansive relations of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that traverses it.

Of course the ultimate question is what do all of these transpositions and translations offer us? What does it mean to read Spinoza through Foucault, and both through Marx? Where does this conceptual collage get us. It seems to me, and this is the larger point to make, is that ultimately, and by Deleuze's own standards, all of this only matters if it makes it possible to grasp the central question asked by Spinoza, but also (in their own way) Marx and Foucault, why do people fight for their servitude as if it was salvation. One of Deleuze's (and Guattari's) central points, and one that brings him closer to Marx than to Foucault, is that it is precisely the deterritorialization of labor and activity, that ties our desires to capital. Money is a real abstraction and one that offers the promise, and the hope, that we all could become capitalists.  All this is something for the longer paper to work out.