[The fol­low­ing fas­cin­at­ing work­ing paper was delivered by the author at the first Lon­don Con­fer­ence in Crit­ical Thought last month (June 2012). It formed part of the Map­ping the Concept panel, which invited con­sid­er­a­tion of the pro­duct­ive powers of crit­ical the­ory — the unres­train­able con­sequence of the crit­ical pro­cess qua pro­cess. The author would like to under­score that this paper remains a draft and we thank him for grant­ing us per­mis­sion to pub­lish it here — the Editor]

Accord­ing to the title that iden­ti­fies this panel, we are here to enter into a dis­cus­sion around the pro­duct­ive powers of some­thing called “crit­ical the­ory”. At first sight, cri­tique and pro­ductiv­ity might strike any­one as being oppos­ite terms. Isn’t cri­tique related to a cer­tain form of neg­at­iv­ity? To say­ing “no” to power? And isn’t the demands for cap­it­al­istic “pro­ductiv­ity” what some of us cri­ti­cise, or at least attempt to do so?

The title of this panel, how­ever, seems to put such a taken-​for-​granted rela­tion­ship at risk. “The Pro­duct­ive power of crit­ical the­ory”– can we think of a pro­duct­ive crit­ic­al­ity? or a crit­ical pro­ductiv­ity? What might it mean to engage in a form of critical-​productive thought and how might such engage­ments con­trib­ute to chal­len­ging and trans­form­ing our knowledge-​practices within the social sci­ences and the human­it­ies? These are some of the ques­tions with which I will attempt to exper­i­ment in what follows.

To be sure, these ques­tions are not new, and many research­ers and thinkers in the social sci­ences and the human­it­ies are becom­ing increas­ingly inter­ested in them, to the extent that argu­ably none of the latest so-​called turns within these fields, be it the “onto­lo­gical turn”, the “prac­tice turn”, the “affect­ive turn” and so on, leave the ques­tion of the rela­tion between cri­tique and pro­ductiv­ity untouched.

Among the intel­lec­tual sources that seem to have been cru­cial to con­struct­ing such an interest in “pro­duc­tion”, it is cer­tainly the work of Deleuze (and Guat­tari) that has taken par­tic­u­lar prom­in­ence. Today, Deleuzian notions per­vade the social sci­entific field^* in its striv­ing to over­come the his­tor­ic­ally priv­ileged atten­tion to dis­course and sig­ni­fic­a­tion, and in order to be able to bet­ter under­stand the mater­ial and affect­ive flows of the social. Again, such trans­form­a­tions imme­di­ately invite us to pose the ques­tion of cri­tique, for the interests that identify these sci­ences dir­ectly affect its prac­tice. Such turns, thus, have not only pro­duced a change in atten­tion, in the meth­ods and the spe­cific con­cerns of the social sci­ences, but often­times also a trans­form­a­tion of atti­tudes, that is, a par­tial retreat from the usual “skep­tic cri­ti­cism” of the social sci­ent­ist and a move towards what some authors have called “invent­ive” or “affirm­at­ive meth­ods”. The lat­ter, accord­ing to Brian Mas­sumi (2002, 12 – 13) are “tech­niques which embrace their own invent­ive­ness and are not afraid to own up to the fact that they add to real­ity”. Argu­ably, such a move, even in spite of some of its sup­port­ers, actu­ally undoes the oppos­i­tion between pro­ductiv­ity and cri­tique and presents us with what we could call dif­fer­ent modes of engage­ment, that is, dif­fer­ent ways of adding to the world.

Indeed, this pro­duct­ive “affirm­a­tion” of worlds, this delib­er­ate adding to real­ity that char­ac­ter­ises some of the recent trans­form­a­tions in knowledge-​practices already res­on­ates with Deleuze’s (2004: 282) own state­ments in his essay on Struc­tur­al­ism. For him, I quote, “no book against any­thing ever has any import­ance; all that counts are books for some­thing, and that know how to pro­duce it.” Thus, it would seem that, while many have been doing the work of point­ing towards the idea of the pro­duct­ive task of the­ory and cri­tique, the ques­tion before us today is pre­cisely how to become pro­duct­ive, that is, a prac­tical ques­tion. In other words, to affirm the world is not the same as know­ing how to add some­thing that mat­ters and for whom. To make our cre­ations count, to make them rel­ev­ant, we need thus to inter­rog­ate the prac­tices of invention.

Thus, even though Deleuze and Guat­tari have been great inspir­a­tional and philo­soph­ical sources for acknow­ledging the import­ance of affirm­ing and adding to the world as a mode of engage­ment in the social sci­ences, how such prac­tices might be con­sti­tuted and to what extent these authors are of help in this task is far from being settled.

In this sense, authors like Manuel De Landa (2006) have attemp­ted to con­struct a gen­eral Deleuzian the­ory of the social by cent­ring the enquiry around the notion of “assemblage”. In his view, the utterly exter­ior and pro­ces­sual com­pos­i­tion and deter­rit­ori­al­isa­tion of assemblages over­comes a num­ber of epi­stem­o­lo­gical impasses that char­ac­ter­ise the social sci­ences, provid­ing us with a form of pro­ces­sual real­ism that is not total­ising nor essen­tial­ist. To be sure, to pro­duce social research that may be informed by a Deleuzian philo­sophy of assemblages con­fronts us with great chal­lenges, and just as great are the gains that it would seem to prom­ise to a pro­cess approach to the social. How­ever, not only is De Landa’s “assemblage the­ory” hardly full-​fledged, but by sys­tem­at­ising Deleuze & Guattari’s work in the ana­lyt­ical mode which char­ac­ter­ises much of his books, it risks strip­ping their work of all its exper­i­mental char­ac­ter, of its power to force think­ing and feel­ing, and turn it into what Isa­belle Stengers (2008) calls “a model for ser­i­ous, adult thinking”.

How to do it then? How to engage with these authors pro­duct­ively, so that in turn we might become pro­duct­ive ourselves in ways that would allow for our pro­duc­tions to matter?

As Steve Brown (2009) has clev­erly poin­ted out, identi­fy­ing the interests and pos­sib­il­it­ies of a Deleuzian social sci­ence is no easy task. And this is so not only because, in a way, Deleuze’s pos­i­tion as regards such sci­ences remains rel­at­ively unspe­cified (as com­pared, for instance, to his –and Guattari’s– dis­cus­sions of philo­sophy, art, and ‘sci­ence’ in their What is Philo­sophy? (1994)), but also because pre­vi­ous attempts at accom­plish­ing this task seem to invari­ably put forth a neg­at­ive depic­tion of the ‘social sci­entific’ by pla­cing it at the middle ground between two ‘bet­ter’ form­al­ised endeav­ours (i.e. philo­sophy and sci­ence) or by strip­ping it away from any sin­gu­lar­ity in an – how­ever wel­come and inspir­ing– attempt to over­come dis­cip­lin­ary bound­ar­ies (see for instance Massumi’s 2002 work on affect).

Thus, in their What is philo­sophy?, “sci­ence” is defined in rela­tion to philo­sophy as the cre­ator of “funct­ives” which are in turn the ele­ments of functions:

The object of sci­ence is not con­cepts but rather func­tions that are presen­ted as pro­pos­i­tions in dis­curs­ive sys­tems. The ele­ments of func­tions are called funct­ives. A cer­tain sci­entific notion is defined not by con­cepts but by func­tions or pro­pos­i­tions (1994: 117).

How­ever, as Guat­tari (1995) argues in his Chaos­mosis, the lived func­tions of the social sci­ences do not really con­form to the tri­par­ti­tion of Philo­sophy, Sci­ence and Art as pre­vi­ously defined. Such lived func­tions, which cru­cially affect the pro­duc­tion of sub­jectiv­it­ies, require, accord­ing to Guat­tari, a het­ero­gen­etic pro­duc­tion of value that trans­verses and restores move­ment to the oth­er­wise fix­edly framed sep­ar­a­tion of aes­thet­ics, eth­ics and polit­ics in order to cre­ate new exist­en­tial ter­rit­or­ies, that is, new modes of existence.

In a sim­ilar vein, thus, Brown (2009) opposes De Landa and inter­est­ingly argues that instead of seek­ing over­arch­ing frame­works, the social sci­ences must find ways to engage in a ‘one event, one idea’ mode of prac­tice. This I take to be, on the one hand, a call to attempt at con­struct­ing a Deleuzian approach as an imman­ent exer­cise, that is, by attend­ing, on an event-​to-​event basis, to par­tic­u­lar cre­ations of con­cepts, prac­tices, entit­ies, val­ues and exper­i­ences that might provide social sci­ent­ists not with any gen­eral ground or found­a­tion but with new pos­sib­il­it­ies for exper­i­ment­a­tion. On the other hand, and inso­far as the key of such events is that of becom­ing inter­est­ing, that is, of adding to the world by affect­ing and trans­form­ing the ways in which the social sci­ences relate to their empir­ical real­it­ies (Stengers, 1997), I read this sug­ges­tion as a call to exper­i­ment with a form of what we could call ‘polit­ical epi­stem­o­logy’, that is, an onto-​epistemological prac­tice con­cerned not with the demarc­a­tion of epi­stemic value but with the pro­duc­tion and under­stand­ing of knowledge-​practices through a trans­form­a­tion of the interests and val­ues with which such prac­tices are iden­ti­fied (Stengers, 2010).

Thus, in order to begin to exper­i­ment with the ques­tion of how to pro­duce a mode of prac­tice and knowledge-​production that is primar­ily con­cerned with becom­ing inter­est­ing and thus, with adding some­thing that mat­ters, I will attempt to think with Deleuze & Guat­tari by tak­ing up Brown’s sug­ges­tion. I will thus explore some of the means through which one of their pro­ces­sual con­cepts can help us inter­rog­ate the prac­tice of social research in a way that might con­trib­ute not only to acknow­ledging the pro­duct­ive char­ac­ter of adding some­thing to the world, but also, to provid­ing a glimpse of how to do it.

It seems to me that the chal­lenge of adding, through knowledge-​practices, some­thing that mat­ters to the world, is one which should not be taken in onto­lo­gical or epi­stem­o­lo­gical terms alone, but one that must also be under­stood as an eth­ical inter­rog­a­tion. Per­haps Karen Barad’s (2007) term, “ethico-​onto-​epistemology” applies here, for it points to the neces­sity of inter­rog­at­ing knowledge-​practices not merely in epi­stem­o­lo­gical terms but also as prac­tices of inven­tion and rela­tion, of “prob­lem­atic togeth­er­ness” (Stengers, 2010). Simply put, adding some­thing that mat­ters entails the chal­lenge of caring for the world. Argu­ably, the whole dif­fer­ence between affirm­ing pro­ductiv­ity and actu­ally pro­du­cing is groun­ded on the fact that the lat­ter oblig­ates us to engage with those who already inhabit the worlds we are com­mit­ted to and thus those who might be affected by our addi­tions to them.

Para­dox­ic­ally, it has been the case through­out the his­tory of the social sci­ences that their mod­ern modes of prac­tice have taken such chal­lenge for gran­ted through an anti-​fetishistic, “crit­ical” dis­qual­i­fic­a­tion of those oth­ers that were the so-​called “sub­jects” of their research. By appeal­ing to the enlightened recourse to uni­ver­sal truth, the guar­an­teed “objectiv­ity” of sci­entific meth­ods, to a clear-​cut dis­tinc­tion between “know­ledge” and “belief”, and last but not least, to the West­ern epi­stemic author­ity embod­ied in the fig­ures of the soci­olo­gist, the anthro­po­lo­gist or the psy­cho­lo­gist, the mod­ern rela­tion­ship between the social sci­ences and the inhab­it­ants of the world under study could hardly qual­ify as one of “care”. Rather, as Isa­belle Stengers (1997; 2000) has argued, it is the motifs of “rights” and “para­sit­ism” that bet­ter char­ac­ter­ise that rela­tion: The researcher is entitled, in the name of sci­ence, to the right to “know” her subject/​object of study, with the pur­pose of turn­ing her unwar­ran­ted, irra­tional beliefs into rational, object­ive know­ledge. Thus, in the mod­ern rela­tion­ship, it is the right of the social sci­ent­ist to pose the ques­tions, to know in advance what ques­tions mat­ter and why, and con­versely, it is the oblig­a­tion of the researched to answer them regard­less of whether of not they actu­ally mat­ter to them.

Thus, if ask­ing the ques­tion of how to pro­duce forms of know­ledge that add and are com­mit­ted to the worlds they research imme­di­ately poses the prob­lem of care, then the rela­tion­ship the social sci­ences main­tain with the worlds they study is a cru­cial ele­ment in inter­rog­at­ing their pro­duct­ive char­ac­ter. Moreover, it is one that needs not only due atten­tion, but also an invent­ive approach that might help us induce trans­form­a­tions in such relations.

My con­ten­tion is that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “double cap­ture” might be of help to this task. Indeed, it might be a means to start con­struct­ing a polit­ical epi­stem­o­lo­gical prac­tice con­cerned with pro­du­cing new modes of exist­ence and thus adding some­thing to the world in a way that is more demo­cratic, and more eth­ical, than the mod­ern, all too mod­ern, social sci­entific knowledge-​practice.

If this Deleuzian-​Guattarian notion is not imme­di­ately famil­iar to some of you, the pro­ces­sual fig­ure in which such a notion is embed­ded will prob­ably be known to most. Namely, the rela­tion­ship, the pro­cess of becom­ing and endur­ance involved in biotic pol­lin­a­tion, through which wasp and orchid con­struct an rhizome or assemblage:

“How could move­ments of deter­rit­ori­al­isa­tion and pro­cesses of reter­rit­ori­al­isa­tion not be rel­at­ive, always con­nec­ted, caught up in one another? The orchid deter­rit­ori­al­ises by form­ing an image, a tra­cing of a wasp; but the wasp reter­rit­ori­al­ises on that image. The wasp is nev­er­the­less deter­rit­ori­al­ised, becom­ing a piece in the orchid’s repro­duct­ive appar­atus. But it reter­rit­ori­al­ises the orchid by trans­port­ing its pol­len. Wasp and orchid, as het­ero­gen­eous ele­ments, form a rhizome” (Deleuze & Guat­tari, 1987: 11)

Aside from the seem­ingly con­fus­ing dance of ter­rit­ori­al­isa­tions and deter­rit­ori­al­isa­tions, what becomes par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing about such a rela­tional pro­cess as described by Deleuze & Guat­tari is the extent to which it dif­fers from the usual account of pol­lin­a­tion as a mimetic prac­tice. It is not about an orchid imit­at­ing or ima­ging a wasp but “a wasp-​becoming of the orchid, and an orchid-​becoming of the wasp, a double cap­ture, since ‘what‘ it becomes changes no less than ‘that which‘ becomes. The wasp becomes part of the orchid’s repro­duct­ive appar­atus at the same time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp.” (Deleuze, 1977 /​2002: 2).

Thus, in this imman­ent rela­tional pro­cess, the mode of exist­ence of the rela­tional ele­ments are sim­ul­tan­eously sus­tained and trans­formed by their double cap­ture, thereby form­ing a con­ver­sa­tion of sorts, an assemblage of het­ero­gen­eous ele­ments. What this example illus­trates is the com­pos­i­tion of an eco­logy that is brought into being not through con­sensus but through a form of sym­bi­osis, “in which every par­ti­cipant is inter­ested in the suc­cess of the other for its own reas­ons” (Stengers, 2010:35).

But how might this example affect the mode of prac­tice of what we nor­mally call social sci­ences? To be sure, a plain ana­logy won’t suf­fice, for the example and the kind of rela­tional pro­cess that so far we’ve iden­ti­fied with the Deleuzian concept of “double cap­ture” remains at the same time too spe­cific and too abstract to grasp the sin­gu­lar­ity of the rela­tions that, in the form of ques­tions posed, social sci­ent­ists con­struct with the worlds we study and the fac­tishes, as Latour (2010) calls them, that we cre­ate and add to those worlds. I thus want to explore a notion that philo­sopher of sci­ence Isa­belle Stengers has derived from the Deleuzian pro­cess of “double cap­ture” and that she in turn calls “recip­rocal capture”.

Earlier, I char­ac­ter­ised the rela­tion­ship that the mod­ern social sci­ent­ist con­structs with her subjects/​objects of study as one of rights and para­sit­ism, a form of rela­tion in which the iden­tity of the one does not appear to relate spe­cific­ally to the exist­ence of the other. This way of inde­pend­ently defin­ing the iden­tity of the “social sci­ences” regard­less of the worlds they con­struct rela­tion­ships with and to which they add some­thing is one of the basic ten­ets that allows for their mod­ern rep­res­ent­at­ives to dis­qual­ify and explain away any exper­i­ence that defies their pre-​established iden­tity. “In con­trast”, Stengers (2010, 36) argues,

“we can speak of recip­rocal cap­ture whenever a dual pro­cess of iden­tity con­struc­tion is pro­duced: regard­less of the man­ner, and usu­ally in ways that are com­pletely dif­fer­ent, iden­tit­ies that coin­vent one another each integ­rate a ref­er­ence to the other for their own benefit.”

To be sure, the coin­ven­tion of iden­tit­ies to which Stengers refers is not a decon­struct­ive différance by other means. Here, coin­ven­tion is not a prop­erty that already inheres in the struc­ture of rela­tion­ships, but an imman­ent pro­cess that belongs to the order of the event, to what can hap­pen but is never guar­an­teed, and does not cor­res­pond to any right (Stengers 2011a). In the example of the Wasp and the Orchid, we saw how the pro­cess of biotic pol­lin­a­tion induces a form of rela­tion whereby the mode of exist­ence of one of the ele­ments already test­i­fies to the mode of exist­ence of the other. In this entan­gle­ment in which they are caught up, each of them could be said to care for the other, each for very dif­fer­ent reas­ons and in dis­tinct ways.

“Recip­rocal cap­ture” is thus not the name of a con­di­tion but of a prac­tical risk with which we may come to char­ac­ter­ise cer­tain rela­tion­ships. In the case of social research, the pro­duc­tion of recip­rocal cap­ture must thus be intim­ately con­nec­ted with a form of eth­ical cre­ativ­ity. In other words, if adding some­thing to the world implies a cer­tain prac­tice of care, a trans­form­at­ive rela­tion with its already-​existing entit­ies, social sci­entific prac­tices should cru­cially ask them­selves about the con­straints under which its inven­tions may “hold together with oth­ers” (Stengers, 2010: 43), that is, to integ­rate within its own self-​definition the modes of exist­ence of oth­ers to whom the inven­tions might interest and affect. Moreover, the ques­tion of con­straints is key here for it alone allows us to move from “affirm­ing pro­ductiv­ity” to “actu­ally pro­du­cing”– from ideas to prac­tices. Under what con­straints must the social sci­ences become pro­duct­ive if the “fac­tishes” they pro­duce are to hold together with others?

We know that the mod­ern con­straints under which the social sci­ences are said to pro­duce value are those of break­ing with the order of appear­ance, of opin­ion, or belief. In this sense, the prac­tice of cri­tique often­times, and even with the oppos­ite aim, sides with con­ven­tional prac­tices (Boltanski & Thevenot, 2006; Latour, 2010). Inso­far as their con­straints pre­sup­pose the pro­duc­tion of value through the decon­struc­tion of appear­ances and beliefs, the affirm­a­tion of their iden­tity imme­di­ately coin­cides with a dis­qual­i­fic­a­tion of those “oth­ers” that they address. As we have seen, how­ever, this sort of rela­tion­ship is hardly “pro­duct­ive” in the sense that any of its inven­tions or affirm­a­tions must coin­cide with a neg­a­tion of a part of the world. As such, and as it is well known both by con­ven­tional and so-​called crit­ical social sci­ent­ists, the inven­tions of the mod­ern social sci­ences rarely hold together with others.

So, what chal­lenges shall our inven­tions face? What should be the con­straints that allow for social sci­entific inven­tions to be added to the world by a pro­cess of recip­rocal cap­ture? To what must we become oblig­ated and what shall we require of the world so that our inven­tions can not only “hold” but be sus­tained and trans­formed by oth­ers? This is cer­tainly not a ques­tion that can be either posed or answered in gen­eral, for that would reen­act a clas­sical epi­stem­o­logy that may attempt to determ­ine, as norms to be obeyed, the modes of sat­is­fac­tion that would demarc­ate the bound­ar­ies dis­tin­guish­ing “good” from “bad” social sci­ence. But I do want to point out to the import­ance of incess­antly ask­ing this ques­tion every time we engage in research, if we are inter­ested in tak­ing the ques­tion of “pro­ductiv­ity” ser­i­ously, bey­ond a mere cel­eb­ra­tion of its vir­tual possibilities.

In keep­ing with the “one event, one idea” mode of enquiry that Brown pro­posed for think­ing with Deleuze, I would sug­gest that the pos­ing of this ques­tion, by which I don’t mean to invoke a “reflex­ive” soci­olo­gical prac­tice, but an open ques­tion that is addressed to the worlds we are engaged with, already situ­ates us within a cos­mo­pol­it­ical pro­ject, for it con­trib­utes to cre­at­ing a space in which the voice of those who were until now absent as a res­ult of the para­sitic rela­tion­ship in which the mod­ern social sci­ences caught them, may now be made present and aud­ible (Stengers, 2011b). As Stengers argues, learn­ing to nego­ti­ate with those we address what con­straints our fac­tishes must endure so that they can hold together and affect them, so that they can really add some­thing that mat­ters,  ulti­mately means learn­ing that we can never fully become inhab­it­ants of someone else’s world nor can we dir­ectly embody their lived exper­i­ences in the sense that an exact trans­la­tion can be provided, but that our exper­i­ence of such trans­la­tion might nev­er­the­less be trans­form­at­ive of our practices.

This exper­i­ence of double, or rather mul­tiple, cap­ture among dif­fer­ent know­ledge prac­tices and diverse worlds is pre­cisely how Isa­belle Stengers (201b1: 371 – 372) char­ac­ter­ises what she calls “cosmopolitics”:

“the term cos­mo­pol­it­ics intro­duces what is neither an activ­ity, nor a nego­ti­ation, nor a prac­tice, but […] the exper­i­ence, always in the present, of the one into whom the other’s dreams, doubts, hopes and fears, pass. It is a form of […] recip­rocal cap­ture that guar­an­tees noth­ing, author­ises noth­ing, and can­not be sta­bil­ised by any [per­man­ent] con­straint, but through which the two poles of the exchange undergo a trans­form­a­tion that can­not be appro­pri­ated by and object­ive definition.”

After all, ask­ing these ques­tions and exper­i­ment­ing with pos­sible answers, already involves a form of col­lect­ive nego­ti­ation, a polit­ical epi­stem­o­lo­gical prac­tice that is never the task of epi­stem­o­lo­gists alone, nor of social sci­ent­ists for that mat­ter, but that is cru­cially con­cerned with learn­ing how to care.

Per­haps ask­ing this ques­tion, not only to one­self but to oth­ers, is itself a way of enter­ing a dual pro­cess of cap­ture and coinvention.

Thank you.

Mar­tin Sav­ransky is based at Gold­smiths Col­lege, Lon­don, and the Insti­tute for Soci­ology, at the Uni­ver­sity of Freiburg.

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