Deleuzian Politics? (more excerpts click here)
Claire Colebrook: For me the most tortured situation I face as a white Australian is this: we have an indigenous people, and actually it would be an act of violence for them to form a collective body because it is only a fiction of the West that there is something like an ‘Aboriginal community’. It would be like them referring to Japan and the UK as ‘the West’: it has about as much individuation as that.
So on the one hand you have a body of people trying to enter the political debate, but the condition for them doing that at the movement is to remove all of their capacity for collective individuation, and I think this just goes back to one of the questions which was on the value of communication and consensus in politics. Either you say ‘this is great because there’s a differend‘, or you have to find a means of political communication that don’t rely on the formation of a ‘collective will’. I think that is the only way that it’s going to work because otherwise one is imposing a model of individuation that I think have as much political purchase and right as Rousseauist traditions of a general will.
Peter Hallward: My own country Canada has a roughly similar history, as you know, but still in some sense when you talk about something like the relationship between white Australia and the indigenous, however multiple and fragmented that term ‘indigenous’ is (and it’s equally so in Canada, perhaps even more so), you can still say, I think, that there is enough of a structured conflict between these two general groups to make sense of it as a conflict.
Claire Colebrook: You can’t remove the molar: that’s why for a certain point in the political debate, you’re always going to have a gathering together for a body, but that also has to remain completely provisional and completely open to the multiple forms of individuation which might constitute it.
Peter Hallward: Completely open and completely provisional — who has an interest in that? In my experience, if you talk to people who are engaged in labour struggles — for example trying to organise a group of immigrant workers in California — or to people who are fighting to strengthen the social movements in Haiti or Bolivia, what they constantly say is: “we are too weak and what we need is some form of continuity and strength, and our enemies are constantly trying to bust it up, to break it up, to fragment it, to divide us, to make it provisional, to reject any kind of consolidation of the instruments that we need to strengthen our hand.”
Nicholas Thoburn: But even then there are variable articulations. It’s complex isn’t it? Such collectivities don’t derive from a general notion of their specific coherence — they emerge in response to a particular problem or a particular event — so I don’t see how your examples are at all in opposition to a Deleuzian understanding of the formation of collectivity as imminent to its situation.