We already know that ethics is to be distinguished from morality on the basis of its concreteness, particularity, and interiority to life itself. Rather than posing universal codes of conduct grounded in abstract concepts like 'rationality,' ethics is instead concerned with the myriad ways in which lives can be led. To this extent, the traditional notion that ethics is concerned with values rather than norms is not entirely unfitting. Clearly values can be and often are universalized and rendered transcendent, as in the case of natural law theory. Even the Greeks, for whom value was a function of particular standards of excellence proper to particular things, believed that such standards were uniform for all human beings. One of Deleuze's great insights, however, is that every human being is the product of a unique and complicated multiplicity of forces, which means--among other things--that there are as many 'standards of excellence' as there are human persons. The value of 'difference' and disvalue of 'representation' are simply consequences of this fact; only I can discover, through the process of experimentation, what it means for me to be excellent--that is, what things are valuable in my life, what I ought to pursue and avoid, etc. Only through the process of pursuing alternative practices can I begin to discover the manifold possibility of value.
Deleuze's explicit rejection of the idea that there is any sort of 'natural' hierarchy of values among individuals is what grounds--indeed, necessitates--his anarchism. As he notes time and again in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the authority of oppressive assemblages is always justified by assuming that certain peoples' values are, in some sense, weightier than those of others, and it is precisely the function of normativity to conceal the arbitrary and artificial nature of this assumption under the guise of universalizability and transcendence.
The process of creating value therefore requires an eternal revolution against the forces of repression wherever and however they arise. It lacks any kind of telos or end goal, since there is always a microfascism lurking at the heart of every system of personal value-construction which can, and often will, reterritorialize and overcode that system. Again, such a microfascism is every bit as instrumental in producing value as, say, the desire for freedom. It is not the case, therefore, that we ought to oppose authority, but rather that we must if we are to ever achieve value at all. The fact that the discovery of value is always provisional, tentative, and contingent is hardly a reason not to pursue it. In the end, there may be no ultimate means by which to distinguish one way of living from another, but it is precisely our inability to secure such a means which necessitates the perpetual pursuit of 'anarchy.'
Deleuze's explicit rejection of the idea that there is any sort of 'natural' hierarchy of values among individuals is what grounds--indeed, necessitates--his anarchism. As he notes time and again in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the authority of oppressive assemblages is always justified by assuming that certain peoples' values are, in some sense, weightier than those of others, and it is precisely the function of normativity to conceal the arbitrary and artificial nature of this assumption under the guise of universalizability and transcendence.
The process of creating value therefore requires an eternal revolution against the forces of repression wherever and however they arise. It lacks any kind of telos or end goal, since there is always a microfascism lurking at the heart of every system of personal value-construction which can, and often will, reterritorialize and overcode that system. Again, such a microfascism is every bit as instrumental in producing value as, say, the desire for freedom. It is not the case, therefore, that we ought to oppose authority, but rather that we must if we are to ever achieve value at all. The fact that the discovery of value is always provisional, tentative, and contingent is hardly a reason not to pursue it. In the end, there may be no ultimate means by which to distinguish one way of living from another, but it is precisely our inability to secure such a means which necessitates the perpetual pursuit of 'anarchy.'
-N.J. Jun, Deleuze, Derrida and Anarchism
