Deleuzian Liberalism 2
The Possibility of a Micropolitical Liberal State
Principles of Justice Must Evolve
Public values are created in a process of flux. Principles of justice change and evolve.
While some form of freedom, equality and fairness is indeed immanent to a liberal political state, these concepts evolve and adapt to new circumstances, new historical necessities, new experiments in an ongoing process of creation.
The concepts of freedom, equality and fairness are important and meaningful insofar as they are relied on in such a manner that allows for the evolution of life, and interpreted in a manner so as to promote life that goes to the limit of what it can be.
Political Institutions Must Promote Becoming
Under a norm of becoming, political and social institutions must be ordered in such a way as they affirm life, broadly defined, including citizens’ conceptions of the good life.
They must be ordered in such a way as to promote the return of pure difference, both in our lives and in our social and political institutions.
Conceptions of the good are many, but any that would detract from a liberal pluralism that promotes an ethic of becoming, conceptions that territorialize and striate, cannot be defended nor incorporated into a practical dialectic in relation to the public principles of justice.
In this sense then, a thin theory of political justice opens up to becoming, creativity and experimentation. It is an open, not closed, whole.
A Liberalism that Promotes the New and Open
Liberal society itself must be seen from the perspective of the new and the open, one in which connectivities are created and dissolve, continually in a state of change, deterritorializing and reterritorializing.
The freedom to experiment and create are at the heart of liberalism, what we might call the becoming of autonomy of liberalism.
A pluralistic autonomy of becoming of citizens in a liberal society requires the becoming of autonomy itself at the level of social and political organization (see Patton).
Social Formations
Liberal society will by necessity place limits on power that accumulates in social formations within that society.
Conjunctions of power coagulate and stultify becoming, create striations, block the dynamicity of liberalism.
Limits will arise and fall over time to address power nodules that stunt growth and change.
The only question at any juncture is: who, how, where, when.
Liberal theory will rightly focus and deliberate on flows that deterritorialize and eternally return, and as long as the liberal state is ordered in this way it will survive as such, and not in name only.
Liberalism as Micropolitics
Liberal pluralism is revitalized via minoritarian politics, the micropolitics of riding lines of flight, creating something new.
Micropolitics is not populism, an attempt to turn back time, nor simply group politics. Micropolitics is not scarcity, nor the revolution crystallizing, but is instead abundance, an overflowing, a becoming, an affirmation of life.
Evolving lines of flight cross through a liberal pluralism and create new social formations that affirm life.
Desire as Productivity is at the Core of a Vibrant Liberal State
The affirmation of desire as an overflowing of productivity is at the core of liberal theory.
Machines connect in society, at different levels, and require a societal playing field to create. Liberalism is all about protecting that plane to connect and create.
Liberalism is at the highest level the affirmation of the plane of immanent creativity itself, from which the new is created.
Deterritorializing Striations of Power
It is on the plane of public immanence in which we create and connect socially.
Only when the liberal state is manipulated by striated power does it deny life; does it deny spontaneous, overflowing, machinic connections; does it stultify deterritorialization. When this occurs, life itself becomes secondary to the static maintenance of power that resists change.
The freedom to create is lost in divisive tactics that manipulate social parameters and short circuit meaningful public debate.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!
Tomas
Please join my email list here or email me at tomas@tomasbyrne.com.
Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2021 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.
