Demos, Uncertainty, Plurality

A Thousand Plateaus is an eminently practical book. It is a stirring defense of plurality and democracy against state,corporate, and technological fascism, though without ever being overtly so. ATP above all is about possibility. In her Human Condition and Origins of Totalitarianism, the great political theorist Hannah Arendt argues for a renewed focus on plurality. Plurality, Arendt argues, is the fundamental bulwark of any non Totalitarian society. It is only from pluralism that action and the potential to act is born. Totalitarian and fascist systems are completely overdetermined in Arendt’s formulae, and it is only the UNCERTAINTY that is born of pluralism that allows for acts (something closer to the greek sense of the term for Arendt, major acts, public, political acts) to occur. Arendt writes in the Human Condition that:”Under the conditions of a common world, reality is not guaranteed primarily by the “common nature” of all men who constitute it, but rather by the fact that, differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object. If the sameness of the object can no longer be discerned, no common society can prevent the destruction of the common world…it may happen under conditions of mass society…the end of the common world has come when it is seen only under one aspect…one perspective.” (57-58) Representational equality for Arendt is equilibrate with conformism. If everyone is given access to the public in equal measure the value of the public realm will be destroyed. Equality in the public makes men behave instead of act. If all are represented equally in our media spaces, on our screens, and are given ample and equal time, even this ridiculous hypothetical scenario will not produce freedom but will instead only produce slavery. Arendt is absolutely committed to inequality.

Pluralism, Arendt (I believe rightly,) notes, is always inequality, but it is REAL. It is actual. It is not overdetermined. We all do not have the same possibility to act because of our differences, but it is also because we are different that some are able to act at all, even though we never truly know what we are doing. Uncertainty for Arendt, much like for D+G is at the heart of life. In fact, the way Arendt defines action is so similar to the way D+G define the PLAN(E) that it bears mentioning. D+G write, “The Plan(e) is infinite, you can start it in a thousand different ways; you will always find something that comes too late or too early, forcing you to recompose all of your relations of speed and slowness, all of your affects and to rearrange the overall assemblage. An infinite undertaking.” (259) Becoming for D+G, like action for Arendt, is always uncertain and ALWAYS RELIANT ON PLURALITY. In Arendt, you never quite know what you are doing. You write a book, you release it into the public sphere, you think it is clearly written, yet it is really only a prism reflecting and refracting bits of other things, interacting with them to create affectual orientations you did not anticipate were possible to create. Actors are catalysts for events they cannot control and cannot anticipate. Reality (for D+G) and action (in Arendt) are symptoms of momentary affectual orientation or intensity. D+G write in Becoming Intense Becoming Animal that “the reality of becoming-animal” is that it is “affect in itself” that drives a person but that this affect “represents nothing” outside of its own presence (259). Acts in Arendt do not signify either, they present. They are PRESENT, but can merely herald the arrival of a chain of EVENTS (not representations) to come. Acts for Arendt are almost potential in the sense proposed by ATP, always avenir, always uncertainly becoming. 

 D+G, though they would never say so, are as committed to inequality as Arendt is. I do not mean this in the negative political sense, but rather in a more virtual-vitalistic one. We are only an amalgamation of intensities at any given moment, a vibrating chain of differential speeds and affects. We are at all moments plural and unequal within that plurality. We are not all things at once, nor are we all of these things in equal measure. For D+G IT IS ONLY BECAUSE WE ARE PLURAL THAT WE ARE. Plurality is the essence of any democratic and free society in political theory and it goes hand in hand with the uncomfortable specter of inequality. But let us not forget, it is better to be unequal (in intensity/affect for D+G and access to the public sphere for Arendt) that to be UNREAL. Dematerialized by a totalitarian power (for D+G this could be the state of the pincers of god) that has made pure potential (to act, to become) an impossibility.