Date: Fri, 24 Feb 1995 13:47:07 -0500 (EST)
From: Jon Beasley-Murray <jpb8-AT-acpub.duke.edu>
Subject: Re: Being and accident (specifically concerning Michael Hardt's book)


Though I'm not Michael Hardt, I'll try to take up this issue as well, as 
I see it as similar to (maybe the same as) a problem I have specifically 
with Spinoza.

The question is that of the relation between "actually existing" modes and
the immanent system of substance/attributes/modes in their essence.  The 
essence of modes does not involve existance, after all: the question is 
what happens when modes (contingently?  I'd have thought accidentally in 
Nathan's formulations--but maybe this is what is at issue) come to exist.


Or rather, I put it that there are two conceptions of determination 
(causality in line with the terminology in Hardt's book), one of which 
works for the immanent (and essential) system, the other of which works 
for the inessential and actually existent.  Passions then correspond to 
this second conception of determination.  As Nathan seems to be pointing 
out, the problem, for an *ethics* arising from this understanding, is how 
to reconcile (or at least understand the connections between) these two 
conceptions.

On Fri, 24 Feb 1995 WIDDER-AT-vax.lse.ac.uk wrote:

> If passive affections (joyful or sad) arise from an external cause,
> they are necessarily accidental.  Of course, the ethical issue
> becomes one of enveloping this cause and internalizing it, which is
> possible if the two bodies "agree" with one another.  This is how
> a joyful passive affection can be (though it is not necessarily)
> transmuted into joyful action.  It is on this basis that we can
> derive an ethical practice.

This is where I begin to diverge from Nathan, I think.  I don't think 
that what happens is an enveloping or internalization of the external 
cause.  Rather, the process (and isn't this the site of epistemology) 
should be one of correspondence--of affective "recognition"?

Or perhaps, this is the space of a "coincidence" between order and 
organization (I can't now remember Hardt's own differentiation here, so 
I'm going by Nathan's use of the terminology) which is epistemologically 
accidental (after all, this is an inferior form of knowledge according to 
Spinoza--though this is his "out" that through such accidental moments 
higher forms of knowledge become accessible) but ontologically/ethically 
contingent (it is, after all, a *real* correspondence with the "order of 
things").

I'm not entirely happy with this answer to the problem.  I wonder if 
going back over Negri's _Savage Anomaly_ might bring a different 
perspective here.  It also seems to me that this is precisely the problem 
Deleuze is trying to work through in _Difference and Repetition_: 
differenc/tiation as the intersection of these two causalities, and the 
becoming of the actually existent.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure if I quite get the following of Nathan's.  I'd 
appreciate a bit more explication here:

> The ontological rules gained through
> speculative philosophy cannot apply to the encounter.  They really
> apply AFTER the encounter, and indeed, they must necessarily fail
> to apply in the 'next' encounter (since the moment of organization
> does not occur as some sort of origin, and does not occur only
> 'once'), which means the encounters amount to one accident after
> another -- they are not something for which we can write a
> genealogy.  The problem is that the ontological rules are precisely
> supposed to apply to the encounters, or else they cannot be
> contingent.
> 
> The point of all this -- if it makes any sense -- is I think that
> Deleuze/Spinoza/Hardt/whoever can be accused of once again
> introducing accident into being, of making being itself accidental.

Jon's provisional response, then: this is not the introduction of 
accident into *being* but into *epistemology* and/or *ethics*.

And, to throw in my usual concerns (why did no one have anything to say 
about the State?), this should be seen as Spinoza/Deleuze's version of 
ideology critique.  After all, if (inconstantly following Negri) the 
accidental regime of causality founded on hierarchy and negativity is the 
figure of (State) Power, the question is how to crawl out from under the 
epistemologically and ethically predetermined and distorting effects of 
that Power, and how exactly to situate oneself "self-consciously" (though 
not really) as part of a multitude's exercise of constituent 
(counter)power.  In the end, this will only happen as an effect of the 
accidental vicissitudes of particular *historical* conjunctures.
 
> Nathan

Take care

Jon

Jon Beasley-Murray
Literature Program
Duke University
jpb8-AT-acpub.duke.edu
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons

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