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AngelakiJournal of the Theoretical Humanities

ISSN: 0969-725X (Print) 1469-2899 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

Philosophy, Science, and Virtual Communism

Andrew Culp

To cite this article: Andrew Culp (2015) Philosophy, Science, and Virtual Communism, Angelaki,20:4, 91-107, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2015.1096633

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2015.1096633

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introduction

I n The Communist Manifesto, Marx andEngels both praise and revile the advances

of capitalism. They are astounded not only bythe constant revolutions of capitalism’s pro-ductive forces but also by its unsettling ofrigid social codes, such as patriarchy. Theywere grimly aware that even as capitalismupsets social codes, many of them oppressive,it appropriates those codes for personal profitand private accumulation. Marx later expandson this process in Capital, Volume 1 (hereafterCV1), outlining how capitalism productivelyorganizes cooperation between laborersworking together in a chain of production.1 Infact, he presents cooperation in CV1 as one ofthe most positive articulations of capitalist pro-duction. Since then, numerous Marxists havemade cooperation so central to their presenta-tions of capitalism that it has served the basisfor the shorthand description of capitalism asthe socialization of production and the privatiza-tion of profits. For these Marxists, it is the dia-lectic between socialized production andprivatized wealth that powers the historicaldevelopment of capitalism’s productive forces.Some Marxists are even confident enough incapital’s ability to organize cooperation thatthey argue that such cooperation provides thebest chance for overcoming capitalist exploita-tion – whether by out-producing capitalistfetters or creating the social conditions forclass revolt. Nineteenth-century mutualists, forexample, founded cooperatively owned factorytowns on the belief that they could benefitfrom the advances of the industrial revolutionwhile circumventing the problems associatedwith capital ownership.2 Unfortunately, nearlyall of these experiments have failed, yet their

spirit lives on through worker-owned businessesand other cooperatively managed enterprises.3

Others have looked to the possibility of a social-ism that emerges within capitalism that couldeventually be wrested from the bosses. Oneaspect of the capitalist mode of productionthat puts this socialization at the fore is theFordist model of production, which organizesproduction through a large factory that intro-duces workers into an assembly line run accord-ing to the principles of Taylor’s scientificmanagement. This model produced an “articu-late, atomised and deskilled labour force in aprocess of mechanisation and socialisation oflabour” that contributed to the rise of masssociety (Zanini and Fadini n. pag.). While it istrue that Fordism socialized labor, it produced

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ANGELAK Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 20 number 4 december 2015

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/15/040091-16 © 2015 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2015.1096633

andrew culp

PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE,AND VIRTUALCOMMUNISM

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alienation and massification rather than social-ism. Therefore, as scholars of postfordismargue, a different image of the socialization ofrevolt is now necessary, as mass society is nolonger the hegemonic form of organizationunder contemporary capitalism.

In an attempt to keep up with the millions oftiny revolutions that capitalism sets into motionevery day, Marxist theoreticians have updatedthe basic insight on the socialization of pro-duction from CV1 to fit the specific character-istics of capitalist production today. Inparticular, Hardt and Negri have proposedshifting the focus of Marxian study from thesocial to the common. They argue that capitalistproduction has entered a biopolitical agewhereby it harnesses the productive power offorms of life. One major transformation thatbrought about this change is the shift from mod-ernist commodity production within the factoryto the postmodernist informationalization ofproduction. Hardt and Negri’s claim is thatthe hegemonic organization of production isno longer mediated through the factory floorbut a productive commons of communication,cooperation, and knowledge. Moreover, thisproductive commons inhabits the same politicalplace that social cooperation did under indus-trial capitalism, which means that it is boththe means by which capitalism is organizedand lays out the path for overcoming capitalism.Hardt and Negri argue that if capitalism pro-duces its own gravediggers, it is in the form ofa capitalist commons. Paolo Virno, amongothers, has called such a perspective “the com-munism of capital.” To make his case, Virnonotes in A Grammar of the Multitude that pro-ponents of contemporary capitalism share manyof the same aspirations as communists. Forexample, typical postfordist demands includethe dissolution of the state and the abolition ofwork, though in the name of market liberaliza-tion and labor flexibility (111).

Yet it is not only a convergence in demandsbut also a shared means of organization thatclouds the distinction between capitalist andcommunist political projects. And if Hardtand Negri are right that capitalism not only pro-duces but relies on shared knowledge and

communication, is the capitalist commonsthen a mere simulation of communism? Or asMario Tronti argues, is it an arsenal fromwhich the weapons of class revolt must come?4

In this light, the terms of the struggle need tobe specified: does “the communism of capital”constitute a gamble made by contemporarycapitalism to survive by relying on an elemen-tary communism that it may not then be ableto capture? Or is the capitalist commons pro-duced within a complete enclosure that preventsthe common from exceeding the frontiers ofcapitalism and therefore requires us to look else-where for the path to full communism?

science, philosophy, and the virtual

This paper analyzes the theoretical groundbeneath a number of Marxian problematics.The analysis takes us “back to the source” bytracking down the philosophical, scientific,and political terms that underwrite many ofthe Marxist theoretical claims about the com-munism of capital. While Marx’s work servesas both a historical and theoretical foundation,it is a non-linear analysis of the developmentof the capitalist mode of production that pro-vides one of the most ambitious critiques of pol-itical economy today.5

The method for the comparative analysisundertaken in this paper comes from GillesDeleuze and Felix Guattari’s What is Philos-ophy? (hereafter WiP). While WiP has beenovershadowed by Deleuze and Guattari’s twoother major works, Anti-Oedipus and A Thou-sand Plateaus, it is my contention that thisbook remains an essential resource for combat-ing capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari declareearly on in WiP that philosophy, as it hasentered the age of “universal capitalism,”must be saved from the “absolute disaster forthought” created when concepts are put to useby “commercial professional training” (12).WiP is the book that Deleuze and Guattariwrote to think that disaster and subsequentlyto return the pedagogical function of conceptsthat analyzes singular conditions of creation inorder to prevent the concept’s slide from subjec-tive creation to capitalist tool. The antidote they

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suggest is a strong combination of science, phil-osophy, and art that brings together the “infinitespeed” of chaos, thought, and sensation (36).Only such a synthesis, they say, provides amode of resistance effective enough to challengethe present state of affairs. With this in mind, Ihope to avoid the pitfalls of previous Deleuzeand Guattari scholarship.6

Deleuze and Guattari provide a detailedoutline of philosophy, science, and art in WiP.Philosophy, they state, is the creation of con-cepts on a plane of immanence. Science, asthey define it, is the construction of propositionson a plane of reference. And art, they propose, isthe composition of affects and percepts in ablock of sensation. Moreover, philosophy andscience exist in an interesting symmetry: bothdeal directly with an actual state of affairs, asin the Earth and the living bodies that populateit, and their potential to differ, which Deleuzeand Guattari call the virtual.7 Importantly,this virtual “possesses a full reality by itself”that is determinate rather than out-of-this-world sublime or absolutely open; as Deleuzesays, echoing Proust, it is “real without beingactual, ideal without being abstract” (Differenceand Repetition 211, 208). Deleuze and Guattarifurther clarify the virtual in WiP by providing athought-image of the cosmos as chaos, a chaos-mosis that is so packed full of determinationsthat it bears an infinite potentiality – though arestricted infinity and therefore far from theanything-goes of pop-science chaos theory. Thepoint of science and philosophy is to intersectthe chaosmosis with planes, much like a planesections a cone, to isolate a workable section ofchaos; but their aims in sectioning chaos thisway differ. In fact, science and philosophytravel the same path but in opposite directions:science descends while philosophy ascends.Science descends from the infinity of chaos byisolating variables in order to “trace states ofaffairs,” which is to say, to represent the worldas it really is. For instance, science often laysout patterns of behavior in constituted systemsby predicting their change and by identifying“the (diachronic) construction of functionalstructures in complex system that achieve a(synchronic) focus of systematic behavior as

they constrain the behavior of individual com-ponents)” (Protevi 181). Philosophy, on theother hand, ascends from a concrete present tothe concepts residing in the virtual. Philosophydoes not represent reality but provides a freshorientation to the problems of this world that,in part, points toward a new world. In “thecounter-effectuation of the event,” philosophyextracts a philosophical concept from an actualstate of affairs to map that event’s potential,which consequently marks its thresholds ofbecoming-otherwise like an analyst looking fora breakthrough (WiP 159). In this way, contem-porary philosophy connects “with what is realhere and now in the struggle against capitalism”

for the purpose of “relaunching new struggleswhenever the earlier one is betrayed” (100).While philosophy is practical, however, it doesnot deal with any particular historical event.In fact, the philosophical concept “does notrefer to the lived” but consists “in setting upan event that surveys the whole of the lived noless than every state of affairs” (33–34). There-fore, if philosophy can leave behind the cer-tainty of science and let in chaos “withoutlosing anything of the infinite,” then it succeedsat something science cannot do: renew the drivefor creation (42). The ultimate aim of philos-ophy is therefore utopian, whereby creationbreaks through the limits of this world and“turns it back against itself so as to summonforth a new earth, a new people” (99).

Despite their interest in renewing creation,Deleuze and Guattari do not intend to returnphilosophy to its status as the queen of thesciences. Rather, if done well, science and phil-osophy are complementary approaches:

It is true that this very opposition, betweenscientific and philosophical, discursive andintuitive, and extensional and intensive mul-tiplicities, is also appropriate for judging thecorrespondence between science and philos-ophy, their possible collaboration, and theinspiration of one by the other. (127)

Three theorists –Manuel DeLanda, Jason Read,and Maurizio Lazzarato – illustrate contrastingdevelopments that incorporate mixes of philos-ophy and science while engaging the materialist

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questions of genesis, structure, and transform-ation. I extend Deleuze and Guattari’s claimwith a comparison that begins with ManuelDeLanda’s scientific use of complexity theory,an approach that theorizes how relativelysimple functional structures emerge fromcomplex relations among the component partsof a system, and continue with Jason Read’sand Maurizio Lazzarato’s philosophical use ofpoststructuralism, which theorizes transversalconnections among local, singular, differen-tiated terms without assuming a single originor reducing them to a static unity. In additionto philosophy and science, this paper proposesthe concept of “virtual communism” as a heur-istic key for comparing those three perspectives.In particular, I show how each theorist uses thevirtual to construct a space of potential thatmight include communism.

manuel delanda’s virtual history

Manuel DeLanda’s work develops theoreticalscience in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s philos-ophy of science. The key point of intersectionfor all of DeLanda’s work is a combination ofcomplexity science and Deleuzian metaphysics.DeLanda’s overall work draws on the canon ofmaterialist historiography but he combines itwith natural history and physical science.DeLanda’s earlier work in War in the Age ofIntelligent Machines and A Thousand Yearsof Nonlinear History (hereafter ATY), forinstance, brings complexity theory to bear onspecific historical matter to describe theirunfolding. But rather than simply adding tothe field of materialist historiography, hisapproach also offers critiques, revisions, andreconstructions. DeLanda’s subsequent workhas been a large philosophical synthesis ofrecent developments in science and Deleuzeand Guattari’s metaphysics, with the corner-stone being Intensive Science and Virtual Phil-osophy (hereafter ISVP). In ATY, DeLanda isexplicit about the aim of his project, as hestates that he is offering a corrective to whathe sees as postmodern or culturally relativistapproaches to Deleuze’s realist ontology.8 Auseful example of this project is A New

Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theoryand Social Complexity (hereafter NPS), whereDeLanda offers a new paradigm for socialscience research that presents assemblages andemergence as non-reductive, non-essentialistdescriptions of social phenomena.

DeLanda’s social science method aspires to ascientificity that “gets history right” through amethod ostensibly rigorous enough to explainphenomena in both small detail and over thelongue duree. In NPS, he targets three differentapproaches: micro-reductionism, macro-reduc-tionism, and meso-reductionism. He describesmicro-reductions as an atomistic approach thatlooks to break phenomena into their smallestparts in the hope that it will reveal the essentialnature of their existence. Macro-reduction, onthe other hand, does the opposite – claimingthat individuals are “mere products” ofsociety, it looks to totalities as sufficient expla-nations for the inner working of everythingwithin them. Meso-reductionism is the “inter-mediate level” between the two – an approachtaken by Anthony Giddens in The Constitutionof Society, for example – that offers a simple“interaction” between individual and structure(NPS 5). DeLanda offers an alternative to allthree with assemblages that are the historicallycontingent result of elements with no necessaryrelation, and express a cause not internal to itselements but as an emergent effect of the inter-action of those elements. DeLanda argues thatsuch a model of non-linear causality should beable to describe nearly anything that existswithin the physical world.

The two most innovative aspects of assem-blages that DeLanda develops in NPS are anassemblage theory of non-linear causality and atopology of social assemblages, both of whichare distilled versions of models he developedin previous books. DeLanda’s non-linear causal-ity uses the concept of threshold, probability,and expression to describe how assemblagesproduce events.9 Using thresholds to describethe internal organization of an assemblage, heoutlines how an external cause would affect anassemblage, most notably through catalysis.Non-linear probability therefore allows materi-alism to avoid the linear “if a then always b”

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by positing statistical probability and repetitionas key indicators for inference or tendency. Inaddition to providing a non-linear model ofcausality for matter, DeLanda additionallysuggests a synthetic process by which thatmatter produces expression. He outlines aprocess by which each element of an assemblageuses simple forms of expression, for instance theradiation signatures of periodic elements thatcan refer back to and combine with otheraspects of the assemblage that they constitute,such as the genetic code or language. Moreover,an additional synthesis of that expression, a“second articulation,” can be producedthrough the consolidation of the effects of thefirst synthesis, which subsequently expands itsdegrees of freedom by enabling forms ofexpression not tied to the survival of its materialcarrier.

DeLanda’s second innovative idea is toemploy topology to describe the possibilitiesof social assemblages. And it is with topologythat DeLanda defines the virtual, which forhim is the differential field of potential trans-formations of material systems. Topology pro-vides DeLanda the resources for identifying“recurrent or typical behavior” common tomaterial systems and modeling their possiblestates (ISVP 14). In particular, topology canbe used to identify patterns of predictable be-havior in physical systems with diverging long-term tendencies whose final state is not deter-mined, such as weather systems. Furthermore,DeLanda’s assemblage theory utilizes phasespace to model those topological descriptionsof systems. To make phase space, one constructsa multidimensional space whereby every degreeof freedom or parameter is represented as anaxis. A pendulum with one stiff bar thatswings back and forth, to use a commonexample from physics, has one degree offreedom. A ship that moves around on thesurface of the Earth has two degrees offreedom: longitude and latitude. The spatialrepresentation of those degrees of freedom asaxes therefore provides a map of the potentialstates of that system, not just any particularactualized state, and is therefore a map of thevirtual. Constructing the phase space of social

assemblages poses a problem, however,because the social has so many potentially rel-evant ways it can change. To model these assem-blages, limited sets of axes are selected toprovide a complex enough model to describeenough possible states to be useful.10 Despitethese complications, DeLanda proposes topolo-gically mapping the virtual potential of socialassemblages according to their connectivity,attractors, and degrees of freedom. ForDeLanda, connectivity describes the ability ofan assemblage to interact with elements ofother assemblages; attractors mark the invar-iants within that assemblage; and degrees offreedom represent an assemblage’s relevantways of changing. And when these threeelements are mapped into a diagram, DeLandais able to provide a retroactive description forcertain transformations, like the abstract body-plan of a species that can be pinched andmorphed into another species during theprocess of evolution.11

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is ahistorical demonstration of the models fromNPS in use. A Thousand Years of NonlinearHistory describes the three different strata out-lined by Deleuze and Guattari in A ThousandPlateaus – the inorganic strata (mineral), theorganic strata (life), and the alloplastic strata(culture) – through the terms of complexityscience. To do so, DeLanda first translatesthese strata out of the language of A ThousandPlateaus because, even though it is inflected bycomplexity theory, he finds the book’s post-structuralist language to be “the main obstacleto engaging with Deleuze” (DeLanda, Protevi,and Thanem 19–20). Once he removes the post-structuralism, DeLanda’s strata come out trans-formed: the mineral strata become the naturalhistory of cities and economics; the organicstrata become the evolution of flesh and genes;and the alloplastic strata become a history oflanguages.

The first section of ATY provides the mostdirect comparison with other approaches to his-torical materialism. In this section, DeLandauses the Braudelian natural history of Europeto describe the development of early capitalism.DeLanda begins with the city, as Braudel does,

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by explaining its material transformations. Themodel he uses here is quite descriptive – hecompares the transition from the medievalcastle built to withstand sieges (exoskeleton) toport- and trade-cities that maximize connectabil-ity in order to expand commercial profit (endo-skeleton). From there, he charts additionalinnovations in urban planning, technology,and money as they contribute to the develop-ment of global markets and capitalist expansion.The terms he uses to describe these develop-ments follow a clear and precise use of complex-ity theory: attractors, bifurcation points(thresholds), and feedback loops. As thematerial flows follow the abstract diagram setout by the complexity terms, they constitutemeshworks (decentralized networks) and hierar-chies of matter that help or hinder development.

Assemblage theory provides a useful modelfor mapping changes in the virtual. Mostnotably, complexity science maps the virtualto reveal tipping points in a system as thresholdswhereby certain elements acquire critical mass.This mapping shows how single actions thatwould have been called reformist according toan old perspective are potentially revolutionaryto the extent that they can contribute to a shiftthat would push a given system past a tippingpoint to produce definitive or categoricalchange. One dimension of the theory of thetipping point is the principle that effects are dis-proportionate to their causes. Using complexitytheory to conceive of capitalism as an open andnot a closed system, one can describe how even asingle minor development might be able toproduce a disproportionate amount of change(because effects are non-linear and exponential).This challenges the notion that there is a singlecause that is the lever – the industrial proletariatas a class, agitation on the factory floor, ormoney as a virtual object – instead, levers arealways found in the middle of two or moreterms. Yet DeLanda seems either unaware oruninterested by the future, as in politics. Noneof his models gesture to or even hint at anythingbeyond ex post facto descriptions of past events.And when DeLanda does make one of hispassing remarks on politics, as in at the end ofATY where he looks to the confrontation

between meshworks and hierarchies, the impli-cations are ambiguous. DeLanda sets out an ana-lytic argument that the problem withhierarchies is not that they are a bad, in partor in toto, but that they currently play toostrong a role, and when systems are “balancedout” with more meshworks things are justfine. Such an argument cedes too much auth-ority to what is given, starting from the positionof compromise with the actual even though thatactual is continuously being upset by the virtualreorientations of philosophy.12

jason read’s communism of capital

In his monograph The Micro-Politics ofCapital: Marx and the Prehistory of thePresent (hereafter MPC), Jason Read gives aphilosophical account of the capitalist mode ofproduction. Read philosophically traces the con-tradictions in the capitalist mode of productionfor the purpose of turning those contradictionsinto the constitutive materials for a newcommon.13 His three-part project first dealswith Marx’s “Pre-Capitalist Economic For-mations” and the constitution of the subject oflabor, continues with the politics and ontologyof living labor, and concludes with the real sub-sumption of subjectivity by capital. There aretwo aspects of Read’s argument that are impor-tant for my purposes, and both follow from theAlthusserian displacement of the class struggle.The first aspect expands on later Althusser,who, having dropped the “science” ofMarxism, argues that capitalism is an ongoingprocess whereby capital continually draws inexternal elements – a process he calls the“becoming-necessary” of the capitalist mode ofproduction (Althusser 194). The first importof this description is that it both explains whycapitalism requires market expansion and whycapitalism did not take in places where the con-ditions were ripe, such as ancient China. In thecontingent encounter between the variousinputs in the combinatory process of capitalism,every input both pre-dates capitalism andexpands beyond it. The second aspect ofRead’s argument that is important for my pur-poses is Althusser’s theory that the forces of

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production do not produce a dialectic of classbut the division of labor and its articulation,which has several different forms.14 Readextends this theoretical innovation with theNegrian insight that capitalist production hasshifted from the formal subsumption of abstractlabor to the real subsumption of forms of life.

Demonstrating the importance of the historyof capitalism for his argument, Read looks inMPC to Marx’s essay “Pre-Capitalist EconomicFormations” for a description of the basic pre-conditions and presuppositions of capitalism.From there, he follows Marx’s description ofprimitive accumulation from the end of CV1,defining it as the historical process of nascentcapitalism coming into existence in Britain,Europe, America, and beyond. Read philosophi-cally expands on this historical matter with theconcept of becoming-necessary. Althusserrestates his earlier work on the break by clarify-ing that his project distinguishes between “thetwo divergent materialisms at work in Marx’swriting: a materialism of the event or theencounter versus a materialism of teleologyand necessity” (Read, “Primitive Accumu-lation” 30). In theorizing a capitalist mode ofproduction that must continually renew capital-ism’s conditions for exploitation and domina-tion, he proposes that we think of the mode ofproduction in terms of “the encounter.”Instead of imagining the constitutive elementsnecessarily emerging from the same cause, asMarx seems to indicate in primitive accumu-lation with the dispossession of feudal serfsthat creates both capitalist control of themeans of production and abstract labor, Readmarshals Althusser’s argument that the con-stituent elements enter into relations in spiteof divergent (“non-contemporaneous”) histories(29). In fact, the encounter is not only producedby contingent forces but is never free of contin-gency. For Althusser and then Read, the capital-ist mode of production, vis-à-vis the contingentencounter, constantly risks losing the necessityof its own reproduction. The preordained telosascribed by more deterministic models are nolonger tenable regardless of whether theypredict the success, failure, or transformationof capitalism. In their place, Read adopts

becoming-necessary as an acknowledgementthat the reproduction of the capitalist meansof production is a process dependent on acomplex interaction of social, technological,and political conditions that have independenthistories and relations. It would then followthat the future of capitalism is always tentative,unclear, and open to disruption due to the con-tingency of the elements in its formation (30).Consequently, it is conceivable that a shift intrajectory of any element within the mode ofproduction could be drastic enough to upsetthe system.

The specific payoff for Read is a foreground-ing of the necessary contingency and limits ofcapitalist production that are produced fromwithin, for example, in the formation of subjec-tivity. Rather than the subject being merely aneffect of capitalism, Read argues that capitalismfunctions with two modes rather than one: themode of production and a mode of subjection.15

Moreover, these two modes co-produce causesthat are immanent. There are three importantpoints to consider from this major development:the first is that capitalism requires a threshold ofconsistency that is met by multiple forces in analeatory encounter, each with its own history,and so it is always at risk of falling apart; thesecond is that capitalism produces lines offlight within itself and therefore does notrequire resistance to come from the outside;and the third is that subjectivity is at the heartof the system (not just on its margins or in a“superstructure”). Consequently, as Marx andEngels write in The Communist Manifesto,subjectivity is thus part of the “constant revolu-tionizing” of production that leads to “uninter-rupted disturbance of all social conditions,everlasting uncertainty and agitation,” and cantherefore undermine capitalism as much as its“apparently objective movements.”

Subjectivity serves as such a powerfulexample because it concretizes a communistpotential, even if that potential currently existsonly as a virtuality. By extracting capitalismfrom a specific state of affairs, Read outlinesthe structure of that virtuality by followingDeleuze and Guattari’s description of universalhistory. According to Deleuze and Guattari,

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capitalism has the unique quality of beingcapable of a form of self-criticism with specificattributes that allow it to be wielded as aweapon of revolution. While Read outlineseach quality of universal history (retrospective,contingent, singular, ironic, and critical), it isperhaps universal history’s immanent causalitythat speaks most to the power of the virtual,in particular, immanent causality’s demandthat the abstract does not explain but needs tobe explained. In particular, such an immanentcausality interrogates transcendent terms suchas god, the state, or capitalism in order to findthe conditions for them to change into some-thing new. And it is that drive for explanationthat may finally push universal history to com-plete the subjective revolution againstcapitalism.

Demonstrating the use of this immanent cri-tique, Read critiques a term, Althusser’s“society effect,” by converting it from thesocietal effects of capitalism into Deleuze andGuattari’s “socius,” which makes it both thecause and effect of capitalist production. Thismove mirrors Deleuze’s critique of the poss-ible/real distinction. According to Deleuze,the possible/real doublet operates according toresemblance and limitation, which makes onlythe possible side productive. The consequencesof this formulation is that once something ismade possible, any real that resembles the poss-ible can be realized and the possibles that are notrealized are excluded (“limited out”).16 Alterna-tively, within the virtual/actual distinction, thevirtual and the actual are both productive. Forthe actual, “the rules of actualization are differ-ence, or divergence, and creation, and no longerresemblance and limitation” (Bergsonism 51).And for the virtual, the virtual acts as a struc-ture on the present by being a collection ofpasts as a block of time. When the virtual andactual are combined, the actual selectivelyaffirms a present from the virtual, adding newpasts to the virtual as it propels the presentinto the future.

According to this approach, there is no waste-bin of history. History does not “run its course,”expending the past like a limited resource (as inthe possible/real position). Rather, the

conditions in which certain ideas are realizedare constantly changing, making the outcomealways different (in accordance with the Deleu-zian principle of the eternal return of differ-ence). Therefore, capitalism is not one setcombination of things but a calculative axio-matic that can add or subtract any material aslong as it maintains its necessary conditionsfor reproduction. From this perspective, forexample, actually existing socialism is not thefailed experiment that many people accuse itof being, but a real past that weighs on thefuture. By combining the richness of thevirtual multiplicity of the past with the openpotential of the future, actually existing social-isms hold a wide range of determinate con-ditions that are actualized with substantiallydifferent results, as in the USSR, China,Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela. Even more provo-catively, though history may seem to convergeon some predictable pattern, it is in factalways composed of many divergent paths.This approach differs from DeLanda’s non-linear historical materialism, which traces thepath of “how we got here” in such a way as tomake the present look inevitable and casuallydetermined. Rather, the more politicallyinflected non-linear historical materialismreveals the breaks and discontinuities inhistory to emphasize the tipping points orthresholds where things might turn out differ-ently yet.

Unfortunately, the territory is larger than themap, so decisions must be made on what aspectsof the virtual to focus. Read’s choice is to directthe power of virtual mapping to “the commun-ism of capitalism” in order to seek out the revo-lutionary potential in elements of the capitalistmode of production. On the one hand, this per-spective acknowledges that revolution exists as avirtual potential within the everyday functionsof capitalism. Yet on the other, it also choosesthe productive forces for the best vantagepoint from which to identify revolution. Thedifficulty of taking differential elements of thecapitalist modes of production and subjectivityinto account, and qualifying them as contingentand independent reveals that there are limits tomapping the virtual from the starting point of

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capitalist production. As Deleuze and Guattarisay, planes of immanence section chaos like aplane sections a cone, limiting out enough com-plexity to make a virtual map come into view(WiP 48). But:

We can and must presuppose a multiplicityof planes, since no one plane could encom-pass all of chaos without collapsing backinto it; and each retains only movementswhich can be folded together […] it isbecause each plane has its own way of con-structing immanence. Each plane carriesout a selection of that which is due tothought by right, but this selection variesfrom one plane to another. (50–51)

Choosing where and how to section that plane isimportant, as each plane will provide a differentimage. Approaching struggle from the commun-ism of capital focuses on the productive forcesof capitalism as the key points of struggle, asRead does. Read outlines the stakes of thisapproach in the section of MPC entitled “TheCommon,” where he argues that capital’s pro-duction of subjectivity “is the simultaneoussite of mystification and struggle” (191). Ulti-mately, the point of such an analysis is to ident-ify key tensions in the capitalist mode ofproduction, and theorize how they can be “ren-dered productive” (ibid.).

maurizio lazzarato’s politics of the

virtual

Lazzarato’s account differs from the previousperspectives because he offers a balanced pres-entation of both philosophy and science. Philo-sophically, Lazzarato uses a Deleuzianmetaphysics. Scientifically, Lazzarato uses acombination of the micro-sociology of GabrielTarde and the genealogical history of power ofMichel Foucault.

Lazzarato’s balanced synthesis is distinctfrom traditional historical materialism due to afew key reversals. The first is that productionis “greater” than reproduction, a claim echoedby Deleuze and Guattari’s argument in A Thou-sand Plateaus that capitalism produces morenon-denumerable sets than it can capture viaaxiomatization.17 Lazzarato looks behind the

veil of the capitalist mode of production,which treats society as a de facto totality, byemploying a Tardean sociology that attemptsto detach his analysis from capitalist productionas much as possible:

invention, as the creation of the possible andits process of actualisation in the souls (ofconsumers as well as workers), is the real pro-duction, whilst what Marx and the econom-ists call production is, in reality, areproduction (or a manufacture of a productor a management of a service even if in thiscase the things are a bit more complicated).(“From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life” 192)

In place of the totality of the mode of pro-duction, Lazzarato posit an original dynamicmultiplicity. And it is from that multiplicitythat everything is constructed. Lazzarato thenintegrates a Foucauldian analysis within thismetaphysics of the multiple.

Foucault provides Lazzarato with a genealogyof Euro-American power. Within this account,post-sovereign power is produced through thediffuse dispositifs of the social, which werefirst constructed during the centralization ofpower in institutional sites of discipline, andrefers to relatively autonomous sites of powerconstituted as closed blocks of space-time (theprison, the barracks, the hospital, etc.). Eachone of these enclosures employs techniques ofconfinement to produce the kinds of usefuleffects that are provided by a multiplicitywhen it is captured and disciplined within thelimits of space and time.18 At first, the sites ofenclosure worked as somewhat independent dis-positifs of power, though they shared a similarlogic: that of the prison. As power intensified,antagonisms began to emerge between disposi-tifs that shared similar elements – namely thetension between the centripetal logic of individ-ual rights (“my rights end where your rightsbegin”) and the centrifugal logic of economicexchange (the “natural propensity to combine,expand, and profit”). The result is liberalism,as it provides the response to this tension that“does not aim to take over, in a reconciled total-ity, the different conceptions of law, freedom,right that the process of the juridical and

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social dispositifs imply” (“Biopolitics/Bioeco-nomics” n. pag.).

Two subsequent intensifications of power fol-lowed: biopower and societies of control. Begin-ning in the eighteenth century, biopowercombined with disciplinary institutions tocreate a combined anatomo-politics of the bodyand a biopolitics of the population. Biopowermarked the points where power was generatedfrom managing multiplicities by controlling theemergent patterns of elements combined inopen spaces and forced to interact. Second, asinstitutions began to derive power frommultipli-cities and not institutions themselves, societyqualitatively shifted into what Deleuze calls“societies of control.” Within these societies,power relations are “virtual, unstable, non-local-isable, non-stratified potentialities” and are con-trolled through integration and differentiation(Lazzarato, “Concepts of Life” 174).

It is imperative to delineate what Lazzaratomeans by integration and differentiationbecause they describe processes of powerunique to the current moment. Through inte-gration, control societies work “to connectsingularities, to homogenise them and makethem converge qua singularities towards acommon goal … tracing a general line of forcewhich passes through forces and fixes theminto forms” piece by piece according to smalldifferences, as in integral calculus (ibid.). Andthrough differentiation, dualisms are createdand reproduced without a reference term inorder to “capture, codify, and control virtuali-ties” (ibid.). This is not the bi-univocaldualism of male/female but a dispositif of the“thousand tiny sexes” and “tiny possible becom-ings” that make up a population. The effect ofthis control is not the prohibition of differencesbut their de-potentialization through a rep-etition of the same; in particular, the intendedeffect is to incorporate or reduce the risk ofthe outside. This is the primary strategy of neo-liberalism: predictable permissiveness toproduce an intended result. Undesirable out-comes are mapped and neutralized in order tocodify, and thereby drain the power of, rep-etition (176). Enclosed spaces of discipline areturned inside out and networked.

When the closed spaces of enclosure are splitopen, wholeness, completion, and coherence aretransformed into a web of elements layered ontop of disciplinary enclosures to de-code anddeterritorialize them so they can be stitchedtogether by virtue of their connectivity and tran-sitivity. The effect of this process is “the mova-bility of the event,” which displaces change andrelationality from its initial conditions of pro-duction – a sort of “communication” withoutcontent, reduced purely to its communicability(Massumi 86–89). That connectivity is madethrough porosity, a leaking. It has beendescribed as biopolitical tissue, but it is moreakin to a giant membrane that filters materialthat continually enters and traverses it. Ittwists the strange formulation that “there is nooutside,” which sounds too much like the frigh-tening howl of Thatcher’s “There Is No Alterna-tive,” into the much more useful “there is noinside.”19 One no longer has to enter a disciplin-ary enclosure to be filled with a projective inter-iority, as control functions through open spaceand time. Consequently, the loss of a projectiveinteriority affects the basic operation of organiz-ation and temporality of capitalism. In terms oforganization, capitalism within societies ofcontrol no longer relies on cooperation butsimply requires coordination. On the onehand, coordination empties the potential frompolitical activity born in shoulder-by-shouldercooperation on the assembly line, but on theother it produces a new model for politicalactivity “meant to be resolutely expressive,transformist, attentive to the unstable dynamicsof post-identitarian identities, of which thereality of our world is woven” (Lazzarato, “Pol-itical Form of Coordination” n. pag.). Evenmore profoundly, neoliberalism transformstime through an ideology that flows not fromdiscrete disciplinary subjects but rather from ablanket attack on belief. At base, neoliberal tem-porality is a de-potentialization of the futurethrough the basic formula: “be afraid and haveno trust in the world, the others, and yourself”(Lazzarato, “From Knowledge to Belief”n. pag.). This foreclosure of temporality fillsout the picture of coordination within societiesof control – neoliberal governance attempts to

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block out trust, collective action, and mutualpassions by limiting connectivity and transitiv-ity to the organization of capitalist production.Yet struggle is not eliminated; rather, this newmodel of coordination focuses today’s struggleson “believing in the world.”

Lazzarato charts out a path of struggle in hismap of the virtual. To do so, he displaces thefocus from the communism of capital to themultiplicity, which therefore produces a com-pletely different map of the virtual thanDeLanda’s or Read’s. For Lazzarato, the socialis a much more diverse space than the imageof that space generated by the apparatus ofcapture that is forever trying to close offavenues of difference. Lazzarato demonstratesthe power of such an approach by beginningLes Revolutions du capitalisme with potential-ities birthed outside of capitalist production. Hepresents those potentials by means of a sloganshouted in the streets of Seattle during the1999 shutdown of the World Trade Organiz-ation: “another world is possible.” Remarkingon the slogan, Lazzarato insists on the historicaland ontological dimensions of this slogan ratherthan on its imaginative one. “To exist is todiffer,” he notes, emphasizing the given-nessof the slogan (“Lutte, Evenement, Medias”n. pag.). And since the slogan was bothspoken and enacted, he argues that its merepresentation on the streets of Seattle affirmedthe virtual existence of a different world. Thisinsight follows from the notion that “anotherpossible world” is always virtually there – anobservation that echoes Proust’s description ofthe virtual as real and ideal but not actual orabstract.20 As established by DeLanda andRead, those virtualities have a real existenceexpressed in physical laws, social codes, and his-torical events but Lazzarato also incorporatesthe force of the mind. Lazzarato’s capaciousmapping of the virtual draws on realms of crea-tivity and thought like literature, art, andculture, giving them the same footing as moreestablished forms. It is here that Lazzarato’svirtual politics overlaps with contemporaryanarchism and in particular the anarchist impa-tience with promises of far-off revolutions. Ifthe other possible worlds of the virtual already

have a real existence, those anarchist voicesremind us, then they must not be altogetherdifferent from our own. To hear these voices,consider the opening lines from Bernadette Cor-poration’s Get Rid of Yourself, a film thatshows anarchists fighting globalization in thestreets of Genoa while simultaneously affirmingtheir lived revolution:

They say, “another world is possible.” But Iam another world. Am I possible? I amhere, living, stealing, doing cocaine, subtract-ing myself from the bad movie of urban lovestories, inventing weapons, elaborating thecomplex constellation of my relations, build-ing the Party. They say “another world ispossible.” But we do not want anotherworld, another order, another justice:another logical nightmare. We do not wantany global governance be it fair, be it ecologi-cal, be it certified by Porto Allegre. We wantTHIS world. We want this world as chaos.We want the chaos of our lives, the chaos ofour perceptions, the chaos of our desiresand repulsions. The chaos that happenswhen management collapses. Capitalismdefeated traditional societies because it wasmore exciting than they were, but nowthere is something more exciting than Capit-alism, itself: its destruction.

And even at its most destructive, this anarchismneed not give up on communism because, asDeleuze and Guattari argue, utopia is a no-where and a now-here, both at the same timeworking to “posit revolution” in the streets“as plane of immanence, infinite movementand absolute survey” in the struggle againstcapitalism (WiP 99–100).21

toward a virtual communism

The potentiality of communism ultimatelyhinges on the virtual; because philosophy’s con-summate task is a complete reorientationtoward a state of affairs, which is broughtabout through virtual concepts, the virtualcould be said to be the potential for revolutionitself. And it is through the virtual that we canthus draw out the political consequences ofeach theorist’s mixture of philosophy andscience.

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As presented, each subsequent theoristunlocks more dimensions of the virtual.DeLanda provides the slimmest account of thevirtual because he focuses mainly on the inten-sive processes of science, and sometimes theiractualization over time. Even in its thinaccount of the virtual, his assemblage theorystill provides a powerful scientific tracing ofhow the present state of affairs came to be.Read gives a wider account of history thatincludes its virtual dimensions, but hisapproach remains historical and therefore doesnot address many of the becomings to comethat reside solely in the future. His concen-tration on the communism of capital mobilizesphilosophy to lead the search for cracks in theedifice of capitalism where communism maybloom. Lastly, Lazzarato offers the fullestaccount of the virtual because he analyzes real,existing potentials that have not been actualized.The potentials he identifies come from analyzinga state of affairs, not from Platonic prefigurativeforms, and therefore make evident singularitiesof a reality that presently exists but has not beenselected. This survey of the virtual expands theframe of analysis from capitalism itself to a phi-losophical and scientific survey of struggles overthe constitution of the social.

As some theorists leverage more of the virtualthan others, they come closer to a reorientationthat would upend the capitalist present. And inthat regard, the scope of an assemblage theory ofthe social is limited, even if it ostensiblydescribes how nearly any social phenomenacame into being. Its primary limitation is thatit begins and ends with science, and thusbarely engages in philosophy. In NPS, forinstance, DeLanda claims that he is wary ofthe “absolute deterritorialization,” as he says itexists only as a limit, so attention shouldrather be spent on what can be immediatelyreterritorialized (123–24). Deleuze and Guattarisuggest, in contrast, that the inability to per-ceive absolute deterritorialization is a limitationinherent to a purely scientific approach, notingthat

even when science is concerned with the same“objects” (as philosophy) it is not from the

viewpoint of the concept; it is not by creatingconcepts […] science needs only propositionsor functions, whereas philosophy, for its part,does not need to invoke a lived that wouldgive only a ghostly and extrinsic life to sec-ondary, bloodless concepts. (WiP 33)

This conceptual anemia is a result of the scien-tific task being so specific: to create prop-ositional functions that can be pieced togetheron a plane of reference. The power of theplane of reference is its ability to describe theworld rather than change it. The focus ofdescription follows from the scientific task,which is not to take us into other worlds on apath of becoming, as philosophy would haveus do, but to slow down our world to thespeed of science. The virtual dimension ofDeLanda’s work is therefore thin. His projectis informed by the scientific drive for fewer,more elegant solutions, rather than the fecundrichness of philosophy or literature. Moreover,with respect to the question of the communismof capital, DeLanda’s assemblage theory of thesocial does not offer a clear means for deter-mining if the virtual potentials of capitalismopen toward a communist future. So whileDeLanda succeeds in providing some powerfultools for describing the world, he fails to keepthe door open or, indeed, fails to open the doorto radically different ones.

In contrast to DeLanda’s science, the successof Read’s approach draws from the power ofphilosophy to consider the potential for com-munism in the present. Read outlines thebasis by which the force of capitalism is over-taken by the force of a commons producedwithin it. Here the image of a communistfuture is found in mapping the virtual potentialof capitalist production because communismand capitalism are immanently intertwined.For its method, such a mapping utilizes a philos-ophy that “is not mixed up with the state ofaffairs in which it is effectuated […] eventhough it is incarnated or effectuated inbodies” (21). But in his commitment to a philo-sophical flight from an already effectuatedpresent, Read limits virtual communism to theproducts of capitalism. And from this perspec-tive, capitalism not only acts as a limiting

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force on potential communism, but capitalism isalso the source and cause of communism.

There are possible drawbacks to this strategy.On the one hand, the focus on the labor and sub-jectivity produced by capitalism may blur oreven miss other forms of life that are producingnon-capitalist alternatives. While virtual com-munism perhaps requires mapping the unactua-lized potentials of capitalism to see how theycould be redirected away from capitalist repro-duction; the essential map is of communismitself, as there are many more paths out of capit-alism than toward communism and the specterof fascism and the failures of actually existingsocialism weigh heavily on the minds of theliving. While, on the other hand, if the virtualmap tries to do too much it would become toochaotic to be useful. Contrary to some under-standings of chaos, that chaos is “characterizedless by the absence of determinations than bythe infinite speed with which they take shapeand vanish,” and too much chaos would there-fore promise too many possible avenueswithout suggesting a single decisive one (42).As a result, Read’s program of “rendering pro-ductive” the products of capitalism may neverculminate in a revolutionary reorientation,regardless of successes in the radical reformismof the ballot box, social activism, and ethicalconsumption, or the revolutionary politics ofradical parties, direct action, and post-capitalistproduction.

Lazzarato’s virtual politics thus offers themost ambitious anti-capitalism of the three the-orists. Most notably, he provides an image ofstruggle that is real but utopian by trackingaspects of the virtual not captured by capitalismthrough the processes of resemblance or rep-etition. This combination of philosophy andscience draws on the force of the mind, bothin its ability to consider historical discontinu-ities and its creative impulse to construct newworlds, while also finding its actualization inbodies living in and struggling against capital-ism. For him, struggle exists outside capitalism,as capitalism is productive but lacks creativity.Therefore, it is not by utilizing the fruits ofcapitalism but by building on what has

escaped that the multiplicities that constitutecommunism will flourish.

Following Lazzarato, the concept of commun-ism must change. In fact, he argues that “com-munism, the revolution, the proletarian as wehave known them since the end of the 19th

century represent dead hypotheses or optionstoday,” and that “communism, as it is practicedtoday by Trotskyists, Maoists, [and] Commu-nists” no longer appeals “to our capacity toact” (“From Knowledge to Belief” n. pag.).Yet, as Marx and Engels note in The GermanIdeology, if communism is “not a state ofaffairs which is to be established” or “anideal to which reality [will] have to adjustitself,” then communism may still be on thehorizon – not as the communism of capitalism,but as a revolution that “abolishes the presentstate of things.” Furthermore, this virtual com-munism is a fresh set of problems posed by lifeitself and not an ideal state or a pure politics,which distinguishes it from the tradition of com-munism that poses itself as an axiom or regula-tive ideal, such as that of Badiou or Ranciere.22

Virtual communism thus proceeds byopening “a space for political construction andexperimentation” that creates a rupture, notby reactivating a potential that has beenlimited by capital but “by retraversing andreconfiguring the economic, the social, the pol-itical, and so on” (Lazzarato, Making of theIndebted Man 54). By offering a new basis forexperimentation, this communism bringstogether philosophy and science to guide theactualization of the real, existing communismthat resides in the virtual potential of thisworld. While virtual communism does nothold the certainty of historical passage held bythose theorizing the commons emerging withincapitalism, it does map out a terrain of strugglefor forms of life that already believe in thisworld. And although communisms birthed bycapitalist production will beincluded, it is creative potentialsnot previously actualized bycapital that will complete themap of our full communistfuture.

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disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported bythe author.

notes

1 See chapter 13, “Co-operation,” of Marx, CV1.

2 See Swartz.

3 See Jacobs.

4 Tronti 18.

5 For further elaboration on the benefits of non-

linear analysis for studying the developments of

capitalism, see Holland.

6 Past pitfalls include the large body of work that

argues that Deleuze and Guattari offer “postmo-

dern metaphors” for the cultural transformations

of late capitalism that fail to take into consideration

the rigorous (scientific) propositions present in

their work, or the philosophers that have relied

on Deleuze and Guattari for developing “ontology

first” metaphysics but subsequently ignore the

imperatives against philosophical foundationalism

given in WiP.

7 Unfortunately art does not follow this sym-

metry, and therefore does not fit the complemen-

tarity of philosophy and science built by each of the

theorists discussed.

8 DeLanda, ATY 114.

9 Idem, NPS 20–23.

10 Deleuze and Guattari note that science always

implies a limitation, “because reference, implying a

renunciation of the infinite, can only connect up

chains of functives that necessarily break at some

point” (WiP 124). Moreover, philosophy also uti-

lizes topological models because “every concept

has a phase space,” but “not in the same way as

science” as philosophy remains open to the infinite

modes of thought (25).

11 DeLanda, NPS 29.

12 Other theorists, however, have used like

approaches to varying success. Kay Summer and

Harry Halpin have written a number of complexity

science articles that draw tentative models of pol-

itical transformation based on probable outcomes

of environmental degradation; see Summer and

Halpin, “The End of the World as We Know It”

and “The Crazy Before the New.” The politics

they suggest are broad but still challenge their audi-

ence to consider a range of strategic interventions

and their potential to produce alternative worlds.

The complexity theory account of social move-

ments given by Graeme Chesters and Ian Welsh,

in contrast, offers a more forward-looking and

therefore less retrospective account than

DeLanda, but comes off nearly as wooden.

13 Read, MPC 151.

14 See Althusser and Balibar.

15 Read employs Etienne Balibar’s argument from

“Infinite Contradiction” to make this argument.

For an extended treatment of Balibar’s mode of

subjection, see the first chapter of Kenneth

Surin’s work Freedom Not Yet.

16 “The whole of existence is here related to a

pre-formed element, from which everything is sup-

posed to emerge by a simple ‘realisation’”

(Deleuze, Bergonism 20).

17 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

469–70.

18 Lazzarato, “Concepts of Life” 173.

19 Ideology functions as a projective inside, typi-

fied in disciplinary institutions. The “interiority”

of the disciplinary enclosure produces a corre-

sponding interiority of the subject, to which the

subject is then able to speak. This was the part of

Michel Foucault’s project on confession, particu-

larly Christian confession and anxiety, which was

never fully developed.

20 Lazzarato, “From Capital-Labour to Capital-

Life” 191.

21 It is also worth noting that, in spite of Deleuze’s

much-touted affirmative metaphysics, the first task

of schizoanalysis as outlined in Anti-Oedipus is

destructive. They say that schizoanalysis begins by

carefully pushing not only psychoanalysis but also

the whole of society to the point of autocritique.

See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 273–382,

and 318–19 in particular.

22 Lazzarato, Making of the Indebted Man 53–54.

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Andrew CulpWhitman College345 Boyer Ave.Walla Walla, WA 99362USAE-mail: andrew.culp@gmail.com

philosophy, science

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