councilor.org
| Source | Ken Hanly |
| Date | 01/06/15/20:32 |
| PART II: Deleuze and Guattari
In this part, I will express some aspects of Deleuze/Guattari's philosophy and politics, with emphasis on their conception of desire as a part of a politics and ontology. Deleuze/Guattari's political and social thought is less a critical theory of capitalism and conformism, than an effort to create effects, practical and theoretical for change. Their books must be used, rather than read as theory claiming the truth of society, the world, mankind. The relation between theory and society that interests them, is not a question of represention, models or reference, but of the genetic (biological, social and historical) relations by which society produces theory. The question of truth of any theory is less important than what political and desiring intersts it expresses, in products, effects of all kinds. This anti- representationalist strategy is uncommon in political theory, but has a theoretical tradition in anarchist and libertarian socialist thought to which the French "gauchists" Deleuze/Guattari belong (see May 1993). Their politics has more to do with 19th century French utopian - socialists like Charles Fourier than scientific socialists like Karl Marx, more with alternatives than deconstruction (Derrida only deconstructs, never constructs). Too much energy gets wasted in critique of the establishment (reactive thought in Nietzsche's sense), better to build the new (create values "beyond good and evil"). Artists are better creators than most political theorists they claim, which is why authors of all kinds, painters, film directors, musicians etc abound in their books rather than political philosophers. First, their overall picture of society. Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism is a schizophrenic system. Because it is interested only in the individual and his profit it must subvert or deterritorialize (as they name a down- mantling process, of leaving land) all territorial groupings such as the church, the family, the group, indeed any social arrangement who occupies a practical or theoretical "territory". But at the same time, since capitalism requires social groupings in order to function (for work and sell goods to), it must allow for reterritorializations (taking back land), new social groupings, new forms of the state, the family, or the group. These events happen at the same time. The life of any culture is always both collapsing and being restructured. We turn to Deleuze/Guattari's general theory, their "philosophy of desire", a unique mixture of Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, avantgarde art, French structualist - semiotics, and a good sense of humour. Political unconscious The French psychoanalyst Jaçques Lacan is unavoidable in this context. He united Freud's (sexual) desire and Marx' politics. He likened psychological repression to political repression, when stating that "the unconscious is structured like a language"(as society, laws, desiring stratas), a Political unconscious. But like Plato, he argued that desire was constituted as a lack, and was impossible to fulfil other than in dreams. Deleuze and Guattari undertook an analysis of desire that is distinctly political, more than Lacan. According to them, desire may fix on one of two alternatives. It may affirm itself, go along as far as it can, or it may choose (ruling) power as its centre and the establishment of order as its purpose. Their two 19th century precedessors, Marx and Freud, were overun at high speed (unlike with other "May' 68 - thinkers", e.g. H. Marcuse and the Frankfurt schoolin sociology). For a Marxist, any purely human discourse cannot be the final word. It must be located within the relations of production, so that there is an opposition, between production (base) and ideology (superstructure). But Deleuze and Guattari argued for a "productive desire" which rejected the Marxian notion that desire belonged to ideology. It also rejected the Freudian notion of an unconscious and hence, except in dreams, unproductive desire. Desire is something else than lack, want, instinct, wish, interets, need etc, which are produced within a certain fixed social status and metaphysics. It is unconscious desire that produces interests, wishes etc, which may act against conscious wishes, interests etc. Desire may be repressed by another desire when its immanent production is blocked. The politics of desire aims to break down the dichotomy between desire and interest, so that people can begin to desire, think and act in their own interests, and become interested in their own desires. The productive desire of Deleuze and Guattari's analysis is, in fact, another form of Nietzsche's will-to-power, or better, Spinoza's conatus (as analyzed by Spindler 1995). This will-to-power/conatus of productive desire is balanced by a reactive desire for repression, the slave mentality. The controllers (priests, gurus, bosses, intellectuals) turn the active strength of productive desire against itself and create guilt which accompanies any active expression of the will, when bound. For Deleuze and Guattari, schizophrenia is the model for the production of a human being capable of expressing productive desire, but it is an active schizophrenia as a process and not a medical schizophrenia to which they refer. We will not dwell on this uncommon interpretation, though. Deleuze himself was not a Marxist, evn though Guattari was in a loose libertarian sense. There is no class struggle because there is only one class, the class of slaves, some of whom dominate others. Almost no desiring individuals can ever fulfil their desires, as Spinoza also concluded his Ethics: "For if salvation were at hand, and could be found without great effort, how could nearly everyone neglect it ? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare". In Deleuze & Guattari, this is because each individual moves between two poles, between schizoid desire, which is revolutionary but anti-social and paranoid desire, which is social but codified and demands its own repression Nor fare they Freudians, but post- Lacanians. The Oedipal prohibition which produces the neurotic who has internalized guilt in order to repress desire is not a fact of nature but the result of social codification. In practice, Deleuze and Guattari have created a new vocabulary to permit them to speak about psychoanalysis and society without falling into either Marxist or Freudian ideas. Rather, their ideas are taken from Spinoza (ontology) and Nietzsche (ethics), but transcribed into a bricolage of French structuralism in the 60's, cybernetics, non-linear science and pure theoretical fun (see appendix for their new vocabulary). History For Deleuze and Guattari, history is a process of de- and reterritorializations of desire and social production. At the beginning is the primitive tribe, a "primitive territorial machine", in which everything is coded. The society is static, and every gesture, action and even the body is governed by rules. This occurs both at the level of economic production and libidinal/desiring production. Everything is social. The territory is clearly marked out. At later level in history, the age of empires, the tribe gives way to the despot,a "barbaric territorial machine", who deterritorializes the tribe, but continues to maintain social order through a highly coded production. The end of history is Capitalism, a "civilized capitalist machine", which radically decodes and deterritorializes social life from its medieval despotic regimes. It invents the private individual, owner of his own body and its labour. In order to accomplish this deterritorialization, everything sacred, ritual or traditional has to go. Capitalism has no need of any sacred system of belief. It is the most radical of all systems, since it undercuts anything that represses the autonomous individual. And yet, the reality of capitalism is the greatest repression of desiring production in history. Presumably, it should have led to an absolute freedom, but it has not. Instead, disciplinary societies in early capitalism as analyed by Michel Foucault has ginven way to societies of control of late capitalism, where poeple in (developed) countries are controlled by infinite digital systems rather than a structuring disciplinary gaze. Ontology and desire If we now turn to their conception of ontology and the place of man and his desire, we find not a romantic play of innocence but a materialist "machinic" thought. Their effort is not critical deconstructive or naive escapist stance from hegemonic discoures, power structures and lives, but affirmative, posing alternatives instead of judging the old and wearsome. They want to construct a social space where immanent "surface" relations can be produced, which may, instead of acting out pregiven roles by some real or imaginary God/Ruler/System, be capable of crerating new relations, a social space non-existent before its immanent construction. First, they mean that a ontological whole, a One, must to be replaced by a Multiplicity, an heterogenous intensive manifold of differences where as many connections as possible are established (Spinoza's concept of substance in not understood as a hierachial One by Deleuze). Secondly, to move this multiplicity, we need it to create something, produce a "consistency". A machine is something (organic or non- organic, or mixtures as cyborgs) that is able to draw and assemble new events from old in a creation, the second element in the immanent multiple relations. Thirdly, Deleuze /Guattari pose desire as the tendency to come into existence of such creations. "Desire, a concept deterritorailized from adult sexuality, while not losing its erotic character, becomes applicable in any context or relation: it is a spontaneous emergence that generates [new] relationship[s] through a synthesis of multiplicities . Desire is the machinic relation itself, in respect of both its power of coming into existence and the specific multiplicity to which it gives a consistency" (Goodchild, p. 4). To liberate is to relate knowledge to desire and power. Knowledge must deal with what kinds of multiplicities and immanent relations exist in society; power concerns production and transformations of relations (capacity to affect and be affected in Spinoza's sense); desire handle the driving force behind creation and relations. [Exkurs on univocity (may be skipped on to next section) The inspiration from Spinoza's ontology is clear in this context, as I will try to show in a brief exkurs on expression and univocity (a concept where "being is said in the same sense [in one voice] of all there is, whether finite or infinite - although the sense may differ modally", Boundas, p. 51) : Spinoza has philosophy of immanence appears from all viewpoints as the theory of unitary Being, equal Being, common and univocal Being. This claim, which applies equally to both Spinoza and Deleuze, must be understood if we are to see how a Deleuzian philosophy of surfaces and differences is to be coherent. Deleuze's concept of difference is essentially an anti- transcendental one; he is trying to preserve the integrity of surfaces of difference from any reduction to a unifying principle lying outside all planes of immanence/consistency, a metadiscourse that would hold other discursive practices under its sway. For Deleuze, the central Spinozist concept is expression as we noted earlier. Expression is the relation among substance, attributes, essences, and modes that allows each to be conceived as distinct from, and part of, the others; "The idea of expression accounts for the real activity of the paticipated, and for the possibility of participation. It is in the idea of expression that the new principle of immanence asserts itself. Expression appears as the unity of the multiple, as the complication of the multiple, and as the the explication of the One" (Deleuze 1990, p. 176). With Spinoza, it is not merely a neutral description of being but at the same time revealing of being as an object of affirmation, of desire. It is expression that, by substituting itself for emanation and by displacing all forms of dualism, introduces into philosophy the anti- transcendental notion of the univocity of being ."What is expressed has no existence outside its expressions; each expression is, as it were, the existence of what is expressed"(ibid, p. 15-16). Exactly the same defintion as machinic creation and desire ! All three concepts, multiplicity, creation and desire cannot be grasped apart from one another (in a social world), The essence of substance/God/Nature (Spinozist terms) is its infinite (but not indefinite) power, the absolutely unlimited power to exist and generate affects. "Essence is power" Spinoza states several times. Now, things exist not as essences but as existent finite and infinite modes. Substance is both the process of making expressions, natura naturans, |creative nature] and those expressions, natura naturata [created nature]. Throughout all its expressions, being remains univocal. It must be seen that to univocal is not to be identical; "The significance of spinozism seems to me this [Deleuze writes]; it asserts immanence as a principle and frees expression from any subordination to emanative or exemplary causality. Expression itself no longer emanates, no longer resembles anything. And such a result can be obtained only within a perspective of univocity" (ibid p. 180). Back to the discussion of ontology and desire. ] Readers unfamiliar with philosophic desiring machines (see appendix) must free themselves from a naive conception of Deleuze/ Guattari's philosophy of desire as simply envisaging a celebration of anarchy or sudden removing all political and social obstacles. Rather, one must extract, express, produce, or better, multiply, create and desire the new in a selective way, as what empowers people, make them able to do more, go as far as they did not know. Desire is not a universal ontological concept (there are none as such in Deleuze own philosophy), underlying all of existence, but as something existing "outside or alongside" existence. APPENDIX DELEUZE/GUATTARI'S VOCABULARY Machines: A term coined by Guattari to escape the Lacanian notion of the "subject" which is often mistaken for consciousness itself. A machine is any point at which a flow of some sort (physical, intellectual, emotional etc), either leaves or enters a structure. A baby's mouth at its mother's breast is a mouth machine meeting a breast machine. There is flow between these two machines. Desiring machine: a machine connected to a "body without organs, engaged in productive desire Body without organs :A phrase from the French author Antonin Artaud. Any organized structure, such as a government, a university, a body, or the universe. Desiring machines and the body without organs are two different states of the same thing, part of an organized system of production which controls flows. Paranoic machine: A state in which the body without organs rejects the desiring machines. Miraculating machine: a state in which the body without organs attracts the desiring machines. The Socius: a body without organs that constitutes a society, as in the body of the earth of primitive societies, the body of the despot in barbaric societies and the body of capital in capitalist societies. The nomadic subject: the free autonomous subject which exists momentarily in an ever shifting array of possibilities as desiring machines distribute flows across the body without organs. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho