Indigenous peoples have long challenged the claims of European states and their settler colonial successors to exercise sovereignty over their territories. Ever since the 1960 United Nations (UN) ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’, General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV) (United Nations 1960) limited the right of self-determination to subjugated territories that were ‘geographically separate’ – a requirement often misleadingly referred to as the ‘blue water’ or ‘salt water’ thesis, suggesting the need for there to be ocean between the colonial power and the territory in question – their path towards decolonisation has been different from that of the territories decolonised during the 1950s and 1960s. Up until the adoption in 2007 of the UN ‘Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’, General Assembly Resolution 61/295 (UNDRIP, United Nations 2007), it has largely been pursued through the domestic courts and legislatures of the settler colonial countries. These countries developed a range of constitutional and legal settlements that determined the status of the Indigenous peoples, from domestic dependant sovereignty to treaties and the recognition of common law rights to land and other resources. A variety of arguments have been put forward in support of special status and specific rights for such colonised Indigenous peoples, in the ongoing effort to ‘decolonise’ their relationship to the liberal democratic states that have inherited these constitutional and legal settlements. One such argument raises questions about the legitimacy of government by such states (Ivison 2017; Moore 2010; Patton 2009, 2019).

There are two distinct approaches to the question of legitimacy in contemporary political philosophy. One approach builds on the tradition from John Locke to Immanuel Kant and John Rawls in supposing that government is legitimate when it produces the kinds of moral goods expected of government, such as justice. In these terms, it may be argued that citizens who benefit from the protections of a just social order tacitly consent to the government that provides those protections. Rawls argues that the exercise of (coercive) political power is legitimate when it produces justice, or at least a political regime that is not too unjust.

This chapter focuses on Rorty’s engagements with Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. It argues that, however much he enjoyed these encounters, Rorty’s philosophical views were largely unaffected by them. He tended to endorse what could be assimilated to his own Deweyan pragmatism and reject the rest. In this way, Rorty endorses Heidegger’s diagnosis of the history of European philosophy, while disavowing his criticism of modernity and his nostalgia for an authentic language of Being. He denounces Foucault’s supposed commitment to anarchism and revolution as incompatible with his preferred Deweyan social democratic politics. Only his writings on Derrida provide evidence of deepening understanding of and sympathy with a philosophical project irreducible to his own. Overall, Rorty refuses to accept any philosophical invention on the part of these thinkers. Derrida’s deconstructive argument in favor of an elusive quasi-metaphysics of difference, and Foucault’s genealogies of present institutions and ways of thinking are either ignored or denounced as residues of the tradition they seek to escape. Rorty characterizes each of them as essentially private thinkers, “ascetic priests” who aspire to stand apart from the herd and to be in touch with a reality more profound than the life they share with others.

Deleuze's ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ is one of his most influential essays. As noted in the Introduction to this volume, it was published in French in L’autre journal, before it appeared alongside the ‘Control and Becoming’ interview with Antonio Negri in Deleuze's Pourparlers (see Introduction, p. 1). It first appeared in English in October in 1992 before the translation of Negotiations in 1995 (Deleuze 1995a: 169–76). Both English versions have been widely cited. The influence of this short essay is further amplified by references to it in highly cited works such as those by Nikolas Rose, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Rose 1999: 233–5; Hardt and Negri 2000: 22–3).

Deleuze's ‘Postscript’ is also one of his more enigmatic essays, giving rise to a variety of interpretations of what exactly is meant by control, along with multiple and sometimes conflicting accounts of its relationship to Foucault's concepts of disciplinary, biopolitical and modern liberal and neoliberal society. I begin with a brief discussion of the relationship to Foucault and the specific content of Deleuze's concept of control, before turning to the real focus of this chapter, namely the application of this concept to philosophy. I explore the institutional mechanisms of power in philosophy and how these have evolved in the context of control societies. Finally, I discuss the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari's experimental practice of philosophy and its associated rhizomatic image of thought to the discipline and practice of philosophy in control societies.

DELEUZE's CONCEPT OF CONTROL

Deleuze argues in ‘Postcript’ that in the latter half of the twentieth century disciplinary society was being replaced by control society. He takes the term ‘control’ from William Burroughs, but the connection to Foucault is more important, locating control society in the lineage of sovereign and then disciplinary societies outlined in Discipline and Punish. This connection allows readers to assume that Deleuze is simply extending the analysis of technologies of power initiated by Foucault, even though they offer varying accounts of the relationship between Foucault's work and Deleuze's concept of control.However, Deleuze takes the alignment with Foucault further by attributing to him his own diagnosis of the present as the period in which control societies are replacing disciplinary societies.

Appeals to right have long been an especially potent form of social and political criticism. There is something compelling about defending certain ways of acting or ways of being treated as a matter of right. To say that someone has a right to something is to say that they have a particular kind of entitlement such that others, or governments, are under an obligation to provide it or at least not to prevent their obtaining it. For this reason, the appeal to rights has played an important role in the recent history of minority struggles. Activities and relationships associated with particular forms of life, such as non-European Indigenous ways of life or non-heterosexual relationships, are often defended as rights. This form of argument can be described as a strategy of universalization in the sense that it involves presenting the activities and interests of a particular group as consistent with the activities and interests of the polity as a whole. “Rights arguments do this: they restate the interests of the group as characteristics of all people.”

From a normative and political point of view, the appeal to rights has fallen out of favor for many on the left in recent years. A range of theoretical arguments and pragmatic political considerations has been taken to provide good reasons to abandon “rights-talk” and appeals to rights altogether. I focus on the theoretical arguments below, particularly those drawn from the work of Foucault and Deleuze. I will argue that, in different ways, they provide grounds for an alternative response to the criticism of rights that does not abandon rights altogether, but rather the received view of rights as universal and a-historical. A common thread running through the criticism of rights is acceptance of the universality of rights. Wendy Brown summarizes this received view of the notion of rights in suggesting that:

Much of Deleuze’s work, especially the books co-authored with Guattari, has been read as political philosophy. Deleuze clearly viewed their initial collaboration in this light. In a 1990 interview with Antonio Negri, “Control and Becoming,” he remarked that “Anti-Oedipus was from beginning to end a work of political philosophy” (N 170). Their biographer, François Dosse, goes even further in suggesting that all of Deleuze’s work, “from his first works on Hume to his final reflections on the virtual, is inscribed in the space of the political.” However, not everyone accepts this image of Deleuze as a thoroughly political thinker. Slavoj Žižek argues that “not a single one of Deleuze’s own texts is in any way directly political; Deleuze ‘in himself’ is a highly elitist author, indifferent toward politics.”

Alain Badiou outlines several reasons for doubting whether Deleuze was first and foremost a political thinker and even whether there is such a thing as a Deleuzian politics. A first difficulty is that Deleuze never identified the political as a specific object or domain of thought, in the same way that, in What is Philosophy?, he singled out art, science, and philosophy. A second, more subjective difficulty is that Deleuze was never very interested in politics. In his solo writings, he never claimed that politics determined his philosophical activity. Unlike many of his contemporaries, such as Althusser, Derrida, Lyotard, or Nancy, he never argued that the primary purpose of philosophy was political. On the contrary, he tended towards a more traditional view of philosophy as the creation of concepts and suggested in a 1985 interview that he was interested in “the relations between the arts, science and philosophy” (N 123).

Conversations

The collection of essays assembled in this volume constructs a series of conversations between Deleuzian philosophy and postcolonial theory, canvassing the relationship between Deleuze's concepts, the phenomena of the postcolony and the project of decolonisation. As an act of engagement, a ‘conversation’ may take various forms, including ‘speaking with’, ‘speaking to’, ‘speaking about’ and ‘speaking for’. In different ways, the contributions participate in each of these aspects of conversational interaction. The starting premise for this collection, also defining the rationale for its production, concerns the problematic lack of mutuality, or else the mutual disregard, which previous scholarship has highlighted as characteristic of the relationship between Deleuze and the postcolonial. Deleuze does not directly ‘speak with’ the thinkers and writers of the postcolony, and postcolonial theory seldom engages with Deleuzian philosophy in a sustained or comprehensive way, despite the abundance of Deleuzian motifs in postcolonial discourse. When theorists have directly considered postcolonial influences of/upon Deleuzian philosophy, they have usually done so in a critical and dismissive fashion.

For some, his failure to relate expressly to postcolonial issues does not simply suggest a careless lack of concern on Deleuze's part, but also the more worrying possibility that his silence on colonialism conceals a certain Eurocentric self-interest, a neo-imperial motivation or a hidden or unacknowledged desire to deflect attention away from the political concerns of the postcolony. Deleuze is accordingly condemned for his lack of explicit engagement with the body of postcolonial thought and with colonialism as a problematic site of analysis.

Deleuze and Guattari appear to be ambivalent towards History and historians. Anti-Oedipus advocates a universalism that would retrospectively understand all history in the light of capitalism (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 153–4). A Thousand Plateaus draws extensively on the work of historians of Europe and Asia as well as specialised works of economic and military history, histories of science, mathematics, technology, music, art and philosophy. On the other hand, they assert the need for a Nomadology that would be ‘the opposite of a history’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 23). Nomadology, like so many of the other disciplines proposed in A Thousand Plateaus (rhizomatics, pragmatics, schizoanalysis and so on) is essentially the study of certain kinds of assemblages (State and war-machine) and the relations between them. What is the function of so much historical material in works of philosophy devoted to the description of abstract machines or assemblages?

In his 1990 interview with Antonio Negri, Deleuze comments that he had become ‘more and more aware of the possibility of distinguishing between becoming and history’ (Deleuze 1995: 170). By the time of his final work with Guattari, this distinction took the form of a contrast between an historical realm in which events are actualised in bodies and states of affairs and an a-historical realm of pure events, where these are the ‘shadowy and secret part [of an event] that is continually subtracted from or added to its actualization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 156).