On Producing (the Concept of) Solidarity

Abstract

In the West/North, there have been two dominant models for understanding community and its associated bonds of solidarity. One is preindustrial and invokes the notion of the village with its ‘organic’ ties of neighborliness and so on. The other is industrial and views community in terms of the shared situation of exploitation that is the basis of the constitution of the industrial working class. Neither model applies any longer in the West/North: in most places the village has become a dormitory suburb, and industrial production has increasingly been deproletarianized. This paper will pose the question of an alternative conception of social solidarity. Indispensable for the formation of community is its ability to function as a center of meaning for its members, and the question of how our new forms of production (informatically driven and globalized) allow these new centers of meaning to be developed. This paper will consider two models for this alternative conception. One is derived from Raymond Williams and takes ‘experience’ as its organizing category; the other is taken from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and uses ‘desire’ as its key category.

Keywords:

• Gilles Deleuze
• Raymond Williams
• Structure
• Solidarity
• Subjectivity
• Agency

Notes

¹The discussion regarding the production of singularities and countervailing constituent power at the end of this essay relates to this idea of ‘desiring production’. Desiring production, when not derailed or undermined, will ensue in a countervailing constituent power and its associated singularities.

²A more elaborate account of this notion of conceptual production is to be found in Surin (2009), from which several of my formulations are taken.

³On this point, see Deleuze (1987, 60).

⁴This is why Slavoj žižek has been right to insist in his various writings that it is both futile theoretically and unsatisfactory politically to seek to distinguish between ‘ideology’ and some brute facticity represented by ‘economy’. To be confronted by the concepts or expressivities of capitalism is to confront the reality of capitalism (even if the ‘reality’ overdetermines the expressivities in question) and vice versa.

⁵It is possible to view this complexity in ways akin to Althusser's notion of an ‘overdetermined’ relation between formations, and between formations and the points from which subject positions are constituted.

⁶I am deeply indebted to Smith for my subsequent formulations. Given access to Williams's papers, Smith furnished the definitive account of the life and work of Williams.

⁷See Michael Orrom and Raymond Williams's Preface to Film (1954), quoted in Smith (2008, 365; emphases in original).

⁸Axioms are constitutively foundational in that their presuppositions are not derivable in principle from other statements. They function as protocols, in this way enabling other statements to be organized or orchestrated in specific ways. The resulting statements derive their meaning and saliency from the axioms that underpin them. Differentiating between different axiomatic formations can sometimes be difficult; the most common way of making this differentiation is to study the resulting statements. If these statements are in a relationship of contradiction or incompatibility with regard to each other, then, all else being equal, it is likely that they are resting on different axiomatic formations. Axioms do not always possess a lawlike character since legal codes may themselves be premised on a particular axiomatic base. A social ontology is premised on an axiomatic base, from which two things follow: (1) the axiomatic base underlying the ontology can be inferred from the nature and function of the ontology in question; and (2) two seemingly incompatible ontologies (in this essay, the ontology associated with Williams is based on ‘experience’, the one with Deleuze and Guattari on ‘desire’) invariably require the presumption that two different sets of axioms underlie the ontologies under consideration. The task of theoretical reflection is then to find a conceptual idiom that enables these different sets of axioms to be reconciled (if this is deemed desirable, which is not always the case). This essay, however, attempts to find a way to enable this reconciliation between the respective ontologies of Williams and of Deleuze and Guattari. Williams's axiomatic, embodied in the category ‘structure of feeling’, has two key components that permeate each other—namely, ‘(class-based) experience’ and ‘democratic socialism’. Deleuze and Guattari use ‘desire’ where Williams uses ‘experience’ and, in place of ‘democratic socialism’, their preferred notion is ‘nomad politics’ (in essence, the politics of the so-called new social movements).

⁹There are evident affinities between the Deleuzean notion of the anomalous used in this essay as the basis of an account of a countervailing constitutive power, and Antonio Negri's characterization of ‘the political monster’. Negri's political monster emerges from a power that cannot be circumscribed by a putative essence and, as a result of this primal lack of circumscription, is able to produce singularities that have the potential to be revolutionary. See Casarino and Negri (2008).