Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics
So I have finally finished my thesis for the Master's program! It's been a long time coming, but I now have a finalized copy and have completed my oral defense. I had heard from others' experiences that at a certain point I would have to just let go of it, warts and all, and I'd agree that's the case with mine. There are a few areas I would like to go back and clean up, but I'm largely happy with how it turned out. I have (hopefully!) made a few original suggestions and connections. And since the aim of writing it was to spur different lines of thought in others, I'm making it available online in the hopes that others can gain some benefit from it. So, feel free to download a copy:
"Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics"
[Warning: 354kb PDF file]
If anyone should find something useful in here and wish to use it in their own work, I only ask that you provide a proper reference.
Srnicek, Nick. (2007). Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics: The Political Ontology of Gilles Deleuze. Unpublished master's thesis, University of Western Ontario.
11 comment(s):
Just wanted to say congratulations on the completed thesis :-)
Thanks, N. Pepperell! : )
Congratulations, Nick, and thanks for sharing.
You wrote, "the potentials that inhere within the virtual are immanent to the situation at hand, rather than being a matter of abstract possibilities." If I were to say that real potentials are practical, would we be able to have a dialogue? What do you think of Merleau-Ponty saying, following Husserl, "Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of 'I think that' but of 'I can.'" We can rethink that. My body as it is lived is in the first place not a cogito but a capability. Now I reckon you might see a problem of the general potential in that, but I'm not sure that you need to. So what do you think?
Hi,
this looks very interesting, and look forward to reading once i print it off. I am in the process of trying to compose a Deleuzian ontology for my PhD, concentrating on the concepts of becoming, machines, and assemblages.
If you'd be willing, I'd be happy to exchange ideas. You can email me at m.d.edward@ncl.ac.uk
Thanks, Fido and Mark!
Fido, I'd agree that the real potentials are indeed practical; this is, on some level, the characteristic that makes them real. And I can agree that the body should be seen as a capability first and foremost. My problem with the idea of a general potential would be that it misses the singular nature of each specific body or situation. So while we can have this abstract, general idea that every body is made of practical potentials, in each real case, these general concepts must be made to fit the situation. In that sense, general potential is never anything real.
In the thesis, I use this to criticize the idea of abstract utopias, but more recently, I think I would temper that position by noting the power of abstract utopias to create their own potentials. That doesn't, however, change my position on general potential, since abstract utopias (even ones composed of ideas of general potential) are themselves a matter of real potential.
In what way do you think we can avoid a problem of general potential? (I should note that your formulation is a little ambiguous - I'm not sure whether you see no problem with a concept of general potential, or whether you think the idea of a body as a capability isn't necessarily related to an idea of general potential. Regardless, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it.)
Also, I cite it in the thesis, but you can read a little more on this idea of general vs. real potential on Larval Subjects.
I do see a problem with general potential, as you've presented it. I was thinking that one might see the body as a capability as related to an idea of general potential. (To say necessarily would be a strong claim, but for the sake of argument we could say "necessarily.") I'm a little ambivalent about the status of Merleau-Ponty's "my" body.
I found Levi's post very interesting. In the comments he made a couple of points worth considering. He made a distinction between potential and possibility--which I don't really follow. And he made an argument against any antrhopocentric views of the ontological problem he wanted to address. This impacts on our discussion of the practical. The practical allows me to question in what way unactualized real potentials exist. Does Levi's example of the acorn and the oak raise the same set of questions? Perhaps. How do we define the actual world of the acorn-oak? Yet I am wondering whether the definition of the actual in Whitehead's terms is ameniable to thinking real potentials in terms of practice.
So, to your question, "In what way do you think we can avoid a problem of general potential?" I have to say I haven't got that far in my thinking yet. The practical would seem to be a way to avoid such a problem, but it's not without problems.
Aristotle says, "the potentiality is prior to the actual cause, and the potential need not necessarily always become actual." Do you think this holds up if we're talking about real potentials as imminent to situations?
Hmm, on the Aristotle quote, I think it leads into some questions of temporal priority, which I'm hesitant to provide a confident answer to. In some sense, yes, I think the potentials exist prior to the actual case, and I'd certainly agree that real potentials need not become actualized. I'm not sure how far I'd be willing to characterize potentials as 'prior', however, considering D's philosophy of time.
On the distinction between possibility and potentiality, I briefly outline it in my thesis, on page 48. It's certainly not a complete characterization, but I think it's important to recognize what is meant by 'possibility' when it is used by D (at least that's the problem I had when first coming to terms with it's importance). I definitely agree with Levi about the non-anthropocentric ontology, although in my work that is tempered to some degree by the fact that I'm working on the political and social aspects of it. Nevertheless, to use Levi's phrase, I'm examining political reality as a regional ontology encompassed by the more general ontology he focuses on in his post.
I have some questions about the practical though. How closely related is it to some sort of subject for whom the potentials are practical? And in what way do you see this category as allowing you to question the nature of unactualized potentials? If I'm understanding you correctly, this second question is necessarily tied up with the answer to your first, since you want to limit/substitute general potential to a field of practical potential (right?), but must then define practical potential in terms of your answer to the first question. From your references, your answer to the first question would seem to follow Merleau-Ponty (to some degree), but I've never read him, so I can't really speak to any possible problems. I presume, however, that this is what you are pointing to when you say the practical has its own set of problems, right?
To answer your second question first ("in what way do you see this category as allowing you to question the nature of unactualized potentials?"), I've been reading Bourdieu again. He talks about the "occasionalist illusion, which consists in directly relating practices to properties inscribed in the situation" (Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 81). An implication of this as I interpret Bourdieu is that an apparent momentary non-actualization of a potential doesn't sever a deeper connection between potentials and actualizations. Perhaps also we should look for an indirect relation between potentials and actualizations. Here's a cryptic footnote from Merleau-Ponty's Prose of the World: "Notion of the possible: arbitrary, nonappearance, ex nihilo--but lateral appearance of an apparatus of meaning which uses content only bit by bit" (p. 45). Hmm.
To your first question about "some sort of subject for whom the potentials are practical," this is actually a bit tricky. For Bourdieu, potentiality is a question of habitus. This involves agency, and an embodied subject. However, Bourdieu says, "If agents are possessed by their habitus more than they possess it, this is because it acts within them as the organizing principle of their actions, and because this modus operandi informing all thought and action (including thought of action) reveals itself only in the opus operatum" (Outline, p. 18). The agency involved in habitus thus seems very different from the phenomenologists' for whom or the Deleuzean for whom. In Bourdieu's thinking it's as if the practice comes first and then gets addressed; the embodied subject is unthinkable outside of practice. In the chapter on "the dialectic of objectification and embodiment" Bourdieu speaks of the "em-bodying of the structures of the world, that is, the appropriating by the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world" (p. 89). This is almost a mirror image of Merleau-Ponty's approach to embodiment. Yet I wonder what Merleau-Ponty means by a "lateral appearance of an apparatus of meaning." Perhaps the chasm between the two thinkers is not insurmountable.
I don't know if Bourdieu's habitus can fit comfortably into a regional ontology. His claims are strong, and irremissibly antrhopological. It is an example, I think, of another approach to the relations between potentialities and actualizations that doesn't rely on a general potential. It doesn't tell us about the acorn's potential to become an oak. It does suggest perhaps that our thinking about the acorn is anthropomorphic, that the model for potentiality comes from our own practice.
p.s. You wrote, "The idea that Being proceeds from the possible to the real is untenable in an ontology which seeks to preserve the univocity of Being." It is this idea, the idea of real potentials, that I see as consistent with a praxiological understanding of potentials. I want to be clear that I am not against your project of doing a regional ontology, and the problem I see in reconciling Bourdieu's approach doesn't mean that one couldn't approach practice in another way.
As an alternative model of the potential/actual relation, I can see the usefulness of Bourdieau's approach. At the very least, a praxiological approach, whether of Bourdieau's version or not, would seem to be an intriguing line of thought to consider.
You mention that Bourdieau is "irremissibly anthropological", and the concept of habitus (which I've only read about in bits and pieces) would seem, at least superficially, to pose another major problem for developing a praxiological version of potential as I see it - namely, the fact that habitus seems to lead solely to a narrowing of potentials. Surely Bourdieau must have a way in which habitus doesn't lead to this closed off outcome, right? (Or perhaps I'm taking 'habit' too literally in my rudimentary knowledge of Bourdieau?) One of the benefits I find in Deleuze is that his conception of potentials is one that is open to change and to true novelty. I'm not sure whether such an idea can be found or developed in Bourdieau, but I don't see any immediate reason why it couldn't be developed in an alternative praxiological theory.
"Surely Bourdieau must have a way in which habitus doesn't lead to this closed off outcome, right?"
Kind of. He defines habitus as "a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks, thanks to analogical transfers of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shaped problems, and thanks to the unceasing corrections of the results obtained, dialectically produced by those results" (Outline, pp. 82-83).
Deleuze is a better thinker of true novelty.
Post a Comment