As I think more about Deleuze and Guattari’s account of desire in Anti-Oedipus, I find myself wondering if it doesn’t risk becoming another apologetics for reigning organizations of power. On the one hand, no contemporary political thought can afford to ignore the manner in which desire is manufactured, regulated, and organized given the manner in which we live in a media saturated environment.
On the other hand, the implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of desire become disturbing when juxtaposed with the writings of the Stoic Epictetus. Those familiar with Epictetus’ Enchiridion will find it impossible to forget his opening paragraph. There Epictetus writes,
There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs.
Now, the things within our power are by nature free, unrestricted, unhindered; but those beyond our power are weak, dependent, restricted, alien. Remember, then, that if you attribute freedom to things by nature dependent, and take what belongs to others for you own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you take for your own only that which is your own, and view what belongs to others just as it really is, then no one will ever compel you, no one will restrict you, you will find fault with no one, you will accuse no one, you will do nothing against your will; no one will hurt you, you will not have an enemy, nor will you suffer any harm.
Aiming therefore at such great things, remember that you must not allow yourself any inclination, however slight, towards the attainment of the others; but that you must entirely quit some of them, and for the present postpone the rest. But if you would have these, and possess power and wealth likewise, you may miss the latter in seeking the former; and you will certainly fail of that by which alone happiness and freedom are procured.
Seek at once, therefore, to be able to say to every unpleasing semblance, “You are but a semblance and by no means the real thing.” And then examine it by those rules which you have; and first and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns the things which are within our own power, or those which are not; and if it concerns anything beyond our power, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.
Do not Deleuze and Guattari, despite all their talk about the creative and productive nature of desire, share an uncanny resemblance to Epictetus? The liberal ideologue tells us that we must resign ourselves to all the ugliness of the world in advance because we exist in a world populated by scarce resources, such that we are necessarily plunged into competition and its attendant social hierarchies. However, wouldn’t it also be the case that Deleuze and Guattari, like Epictetus, tell us that if we suffer then this is because we have created the wrong desires and were we simply to modify our desires we would be capable of tolerating whatever circumstances we might find ourselves in? Like Deleuze and Guattari, Epictetus seems to suggest that desire is not something natural or inborn, but is a product of our creative freedom. Deleuze, of course, has a strong connection to the stoics through his relation to Spinoza and his development of a stoic ontology in The Logic of Sense. The risk here is that we find ourselves perilously close to claiming that true revolutions are not revolutions in how material conditions or social relations are organized, but rather are revolutions of desire that transform our relations to these conditions.
In this connection, The Shawshank Redemption would end up being a film about Deleuzian desire.
For what we are led to witness in Darabont’s Shawshank Redemption is that it is not, primarily, our material conditions that are intolerable, but rather our relationship to these conditions. The character of Brookes, for example, ends up committing suicide after he finally gets paroled not because conditions on the outside world are intrinsically miserable for him– we know such conditions aren’t intrinsic because Andy is able to find peace and happiness on the outside world –but rather because he is unable to restructure the nature of his desire so as to find peace of mind in the outside world.
Yet if this is the case, if it is our desire that defines the valence of the world rather than the world, then it would seem that the entire animus is once again placed on the agent. If you are miserable then it is because you have failed to create a suitable field of desire, not because the field is itself intrinsically miserable. In a paradoxical twist, the thought of the free man becomes the thought of the slave. As such, the social field is once again rendered immune to social critique. Perhaps this is the reason that it is of such vital importance that Deleuze and Guattari deconstruct the primacy of the self-enclosed social subject, instead showing that desire itself immediately invests the social field and issues from the social field, that desire is material and not simply a property of biological subjects, and that the subject itself emerges as a product of desire rather than the reverse.
June 22, 2008 at 9:30 pm
[...] toss up a couple of links to two pieces over at Larval Subjects, where Sinthome is blogging about scarcity, reflecting on Deleuze & Guattari’s suggestion that notions of lack or scarcity operate [...]
June 22, 2008 at 11:15 pm
“Perhaps this is the reason that it is of such vital importance that Deleuze and Guattari deconstruct the primacy of the self-enclosed social subject, instead showing that desire itself immediately invests the social field and issues from the social field, that desire is material and not simply a property of biological subjects, and that the subject itself emerges as a product of desire rather than the reverse.”
Perhaps.
Seriously, the idea that “The risk here is that we find ourselves perilously close to claiming that true revolutions are not revolutions in how material conditions or social relations are organized, but rather are revolutions of desire that transform our relations to these conditions.” seems contrary to the entire work of D&G, signed both singularly of collectively. There is no separation between desire and material conditions, and D&G are quick and repetitive about condemning anything that implies otherwise. (I mean, it’s called anti-oedipus for a reason).
What they are arguing is you can’t have a material revolution without a revolution in desire as well. Communism isn’t just a question of saying, “Well, right now the shit isn’t distributed very well, and we just need a better distribution of the shit.” Rather, communism must bring into question our very modes of appropriation. Desire is political, it is the question of the political itself. To (badly) paraphrase Spinoza, we don’t desire the good because it is the good, rather we term the good what we desire.
June 22, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Excellent! This is exactly what I’m trying to bring out, without the words to do so. I agree that such a claim is contrary to the aims of their work, but am raising the question of whether they manage to think that relationship between desire and material conditions adequately (in much the same way that someone’s entire work could be devoted to thinking motion, while still failing to adequately respond to Zeno). While I fully agree with the thesis that you can’t have material revolution without revolution in desire (and also that material revolutions without the latter end up badly insofar as they reinstitute microfasicisms), I think there’s also something more going on in their work. That is, desire can’t be seen as something other than material conditions or different than material conditions (as perhaps Baudrillard might argue in his earlier work). Rather, for their account to get off the ground desire has to be actually productive of the real.
The question is how far we really want to push this. Deleuze and Guattari often go all the way, treating even physical and biological processes as instances of this conception of desire. This would harken back to Deleuze’s conception of habit in Difference and Repetition, where he remarks that,
Lack here becomes a product of a prior organic synthesis or habitus that then subsequently allows something to be registered as absent. But if this is where we’re led with their analysis, are we really led much further in the domain of political thought insofar as while it is certainly true that new biological becomings take place, we generally have very little ability to impact these bio-syntheses.
June 23, 2008 at 7:24 am
That’s a really good response, and I plan to respond. But knowing me and the internet, I’ll forget or lose interest. So before I did that I wanted to say I particularly liked the line,
“in much the same way that someone’s entire work could be devoted to thinking motion, while still failing to adequately respond to Zeno.”
I think that clarified some things for me.
And oh well, here are some poorly put together thoughts.
I think I get what you are saying at the bottom of your response, as far as instances of the biological. “biological becomings take place, we generally have very little ability to impact these bio-syntheses.” And they certainly do insist on the non-metaphorical reality of these becomings as well. You do get the sense that they almost believe if we change how we desire we can change our very form (a becoming-animal, a becoming-molecular, et cetera). But then I also like the line about very little ability to impact this, I think I’d like it better if it was very little ability to control this. Particularly in some of Guattari’s solo works, you get the idea that becomings are more often accidental than anything else. The idea of “affective contamination” that informs even the title of Guattari’s choasmosis. But of course, that I guess brings up another obvious question: if becoming is often accidental (and frequently dangerous, as they will allow in ATP), then what does it mean to have a political commitment to becoming? And to go a step further, if becoming is accidental because it is a contamination, and therefore becomings are never individual but always already implicated into the collective and socius, then how am “I” suppose to relate to desire? Or I guess to rephrase it, what is a revolution that is based upon the accidental and the is always devoid of any possibility of an individual commitment?
I think this has something to do with the role of philosophy for Deleuze and Guattari. The role they give to the experiment, the role they give to the intuitive, the role they give to the aleatory, and the role they give to the ecological. You know the line from (I believe Dialogues), “Never interpret; experience, experiment.”
I didn’t think when I started responding I was even going to make a response, much less address the issue of lack, but here I am. I can’t hear lack the same way you do, I don’t have psychoanalytic ears. I have noticed, more than once, that I am terrible at discussing lack with people who can hear it in a psychoanalytic register (a bit, perhaps, like Foucault hearing the word desire).
I think it is on this issue of the affective contamination that a superabundance is found in D&G. There is always an outside energy breaking in, decoding us. They take seriously, literally, Spinoza’s formula that we don’t yet know what bodies can do. For them the very fact that we have life (and the vitalism of Deleuze should not be underestimated for him) means that change in every radical and revolutionary sense is possible. We cannot lack because we are alive, and life is always more powerful than any force that tries to contain it. Deleuze (at least) was committed along with Foucault and Nietzsche that we could overcome being human.
But, at here I must end, it is not just the body. We do not yet know what thinking can do.
June 25, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Scu asks: “what is a revolution that is based upon the accidental and the is always devoid of any possibility of an individual commitment?”
While my familiarity with Deleuze and Guttari is limited, I have been struggling with the same problem in the writing of Althusser. In his later writings, Althusser writes a great deal on the aleatory dimension of being, the Epicurean swerve, and the condensation of multiplicity into definite, although temporary and precarious formations. Especially important, here, is the fact that Althusser connects these reflections on aleatory materialism (the swerves, formations, and dissipations of being) with Machiavelli. In Machiavelli and Us, Althusser reads Machiavelli’s work as being oriented around the urgency and demand of the singular political conjuncture in which he existed. For Machiavelli this political demand was the creation of Italy as a nation-state. There was no guarantee intrinsic to the social and political conditions that this result would emerge. Further, there was no guarantee that were it to occur, the result would take hold and achieve a duration, a temporal existence (Althusser jokes that Italy still has not achieved this goal).
In other words, Althusser reflects upon the becoming necessary of contingency in a specifically political register {the act of hegemony}. This converges, I believe, with the above posts in one fundamental problem, crudely put – so how political transformation actually take place? How does one impact the formation of the social, especially if one has “very little ability to impact … bio-syntheses” that determine us? To shift gears slightly and use Derridean parlance, if we are constituted through a network of “traces”, and unable to fully erase those traces, as he chides Lacan for forgetting, in “…And say the Animal Responded”, then what are we exactly able to do on the level of political transformation?
I think it is also very telling that Althusser seems to land on different sides of the issue. Around the time period Althusser was writing about Machiavelli, he wrote the following in a letter to his friend:
“I passed a very difficult summer, but I’ve now found a certain equilibrium. I can read a bit and am capable of waiting. The incredible way the problems of the world tie themselves around personal fantasies is incredible and pitiless. I’ve lived this. But I also lived the first denouement of the thing, and this gave me some courage and a kind of “learned” courage. This changes nothing in the mess that is the world, but in the obsessions of the soul… it’s a beginning that is, let us say, encouraging. And so, change the order of one’s thoughts rather than the order of the world…”
I am at the same time very moved and perplexed about the above passage. Where does one begin? Even though, I completely reject the idea of a natural dichotomy between the individual and society (agreeing with Balibar that all individuality is “transindividual”), is there not a huge difference, at least in practice, between ethically reforming one’s desire and the political work of changing one’s collective conditions, institutions, practices, and ideologies?
To end on a note of brutal honesty, I am always paralyzed by a double fear that, in some way or another, I am always already displacing the problem – to direct one’s attention to the political and work on reforming the conditions (critiquing modes of identification, practices, positions, etc.), I am afraid that I am avoiding the painful transformations in myself. Similarly, to simply focus on myself, reflect upon and challenge my own desires and behaviors, I feel like I am withdrawing from the more important level of the ground that determines and supplies the coordinates for those very desires. Perhaps the answer lies in the uncomfortable position of always doing both, without ever fully reconciling the two.
July 9, 2008 at 12:01 am
“If you are miserable then it is because you have failed to create a suitable field of desire, not because the field is itself intrinsically miserable.”
I’ve seen Deleuzian-inspired authors who write in these terms – William Connolly tends this way for example – and this would certainly lead theory back into the ideological function of morality theorised by Skillen, turning problems with society into problems with the individual who doesn’t “fit in”. But I think this goes against the whole tendency of Deleuzian theory which is precisely the opposite, to “subordinate social production to desiring-production”. Remember that social spaces, not simply individual experiences, can be smooth/striated, arborescent/rhizomatic, etc. Of course a prison would be an archetypal striated arborescent space (one of the original Foucaldian models no less).
The emancipatory gesture in Deleuze and Guattari is not purely individual, nor macrosocial, but consists in constructing new kinds of connections and hence new assemblages. These assemblages can consist of many different kinds of “molecules”. If they’re genuinely emancipatory they should take the form of lines of flight which carry out becomings-other/becomings-minoritarian, carry out a smoothing of space and deterritorialise the existing field. The political goal is to reach a situation made up of smooth space instead of striated space, rhizomes instead of arborescent hierarchies, supple instead of rigid segmentarities, etc. The ultimate goal is thus very extensive, but is realised by processes which can be “relative” – lines of flight, relative deterritorialisations, etc.
In relation to prisons, I suspect Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis would be on lines of flight – the ultimate figure of this would be the breakout or mass uprising – there’s a mention at one point of Black Panther George Jackson’s prison letters, the phrase “flee, but while fleeing, look for a weapon”. Smaller “lines of flight” contributing to the break might include the kinds of strategies discussed by Goffman in Asylums, where “the prisoner’s body remains in place, but her/his mind has fled” – as when a prisoner is standing obediently in line but has a plank for building an escape tunnel hidden behind his back; or the underground library of undocumented books which circulate between cells and even ‘flee’ precipitously out of cell windows to avoid detection. (After reading yesterday’s news in the UK, I notice that mobile phones may have become the latest such “insurgent objects”). The experience of someone unable to escape would be
Actually “Shawshank Redemption” (in pretty much the way you’re reading it) is something of a model for Zizek, providing an example of the Act and of “feminine desire” through the very psychological acceptance you (rightly) find so suspicious – see http://www.lacan.com/zizwoman.htm and especially “The Fragile Absolute” 160.
I wouldn’t see the subject as disappearing entirely in Deleuze and Guattari. Rather, the subject becomes molecular. This means it loses its unity as a molar aggregate but continues to exist as a node, or a number of nodes, in molecular connections and rhizomes (hence it can act on other nodes, form or break connections, etc). It doesn’t do this as a unitary will, it does it as force/s of desire (hence it doesn’t have a superego or ‘cop in its head’ which can insist it obeys a ‘self-deadening should’ whether it likes it or not). This does not mean that it loses ethical direction. It has the ethical direction provided by an affirmative ethic (telling it what is good and bad from the standpoint of its desire/s which it affirms), but not the direction of a negative morality. (I don’t think Deleuzian theory necessarily means to act on every immediate impulse, even though it has a ceteris paribus position of doing so – this might not even be possible when there are conflicting desires; one also has to address whether the impulse is interfering with other desires, whether the desire is active or reactive, whether it meets the criterion of eternal return, hence sustainability and so on – what one can’t do is general subordination of desires either to reactive force or to external forces, the formation of striated/arborescent/etc overall structures, and repression in the Freudian sense, where a desire is completely repressed because it goes against some other regulative principle – I think there’s a difference between contingently not doing something and repressing the desire one had to do it). Hence we (as molecular selves) actually have a lot of power to impact bio-syntheses etc – a lot more in fact than is conceivable in terms of alienated molar selves who are necessarily limited by their representational fixities and structural positions.
In terms of political commitment, actively-desiring people could be articulated, “assembled”, into a political “subject-group” type of formation on the basis of active desire – meaning, their desire to be part of the group would come from the affective (emotional) affirmation either of the experience of action within the group or of the group’s project, what it constructs. Political squatting, anti-capitalist summit protests, grassroots networks to provide basic services, carnivalesque events such as Reclaim the Streets, events such as France 1968, acts of resistance which are enjoyable because they feel empowering, as well as certain social forms associated with indigenous epistemologies, would be the kinds of things which this enables. So in a sense this doesn’t rule out “political commitment”, though it does rule out the type of commitment which exists in a subjugated group (in Sartrean terms a pledged group or organisation). From a Deleuzian point of view the ruling-out of subjugated groups and alienated commitment to a political sovereign or molar aggregate is rather a good thing! It keeps a Deleuzian subject from being drawn into microfascisms, Stalinisms, reformisms, reactive formations of all kinds. “If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution” (Emma Goldman).
As for the conflation of desire and materiality – it’s true that “desire” is sometimes imputed to physical entities, but the terminology varies in different places; for instance, in Deleuze’s Nietzsche book, “desire” is largely replaced by “force”. In more philosophical moments, Deleuze gives the impression that desire is a kind of impersonal self-becoming of the univocity of being which simply passes through people (who don’t really exist anyway) along the way (this is close to what I’d take as a Spinozian position, maybe wrongly). I think usually though, it’s more a matter of desires which are sub-individual and inter-individual having a primacy over the “molar” self (hence the self exists as a relational node but not something organic or totalising), the former exemplified by preconscious and unconscious psychological processes, the latter by social connections. The former are forming connections in and through the latter without asking permission from the will or the ego (in this Deleuze is very psychoanalytic), but at the same time their social inscription can be of different kinds (active or reactive, schizoid or paranoiac).
I’m also not so sure that Deleuze and Guattari have a ‘political commitment to becoming’ without regard for whether it is ‘dangerous’ or not. Becoming is always operating underneath being, it happens whether we want it to or not, so it isn’t a question of being for becomings whether they are becoming-minority or becoming-majority, it’s about being for the priority of becoming over being (which is necessarily becoming-minority) rather than the priority of being over becoming (which is necessarily becoming-majority). The vibe I get from Deleuze and Guattari is that the point of their intervention (of schizoanalysis, of philosophy, of political action, etc) is to try to encourage flows in one direction (towards active rather than reactive structuring, towards ‘absolute deterritorialisation’ rather than overcoding or axiomatics, towards rhizomes rather than arborescence, towards smooth rather than striated space)
The rather different ethical question of why one should prefer active/rhizomatic/molecular/smooth/schizoid assemblages to reactive/arborescent/molar/striated/paranoiac assemblages can be answered in various ways:
1. Because the former construct desires which can in principle be satisfied, whereas the former construct desires which are in principle insatiable (hence it is a matter of “enlightened self-interest” to favour the former). We all have active desires on some level, or else reactive desires which are really trapped forms of active desires (indeed, arguably everything which exists has active forces in it); therefore we should logically try to create a context in which active desires can be freed and realised and form connections, and oppose contexts which necessitate the suppression of all active desires (remembering that a context either frees active desires or it does not – a dominant group cannot have active desires realised through subordinating others because it would have to become a “majority”, an in-group reducible to its representational inscription, to do so). This is a reading which I’d typify as Stirnerian, and I’d suggest pops up in Deleuze’s work on Nietzsche;
2. Because the former express the ontological tendency of being to singularise whereas the latter deny it – a position implied in some of the more philosophical moments of Deleuze’s solo works such as “Difference and Repetition” – an ontological position;
3. Because the former is revolutionary and the latter reactionary, so the former puts us on the right side politically, or on the side of the ascendant force in history (schizoid flows as the inner limit of capitalism) – a position which would echo Althusser and Negri, and can be deduced from the historical sequence in “Anti-Oedipus” and the way schizophrenia is located at the end of the sequence, as well as by Guattari’s association with Negri who explicitly takes this kind of position;
4. Because the latter causes us to cause misery to ourselves and others which is avoidable and hence should be avoided (one could add – they also cause unsustainability, social blockages, socially necessary deviance, impossibilities of communication, etc) – a kind of consequentialist position;
5. Because it is “therapeutic” or otherwise beneficial from a contingent point of view (for some people) – it helps bring happiness/fulfilment/welfare etc by breaking down fixities, solving problems and clearing blockages (a pragmatist argument);
6. Because the former is our “natural” state of being and the latter is not (obviously Deleuzians wouldn’t use such a crudely essentialist-sounding turn of phrase, they’d say something such as that it is the immanent actuality of our molecular becomings) – a position Deleuze suggests that Nietzsche takes, and which he could also have picked up off Reich and Bergson (a “naturalist” argument);
7. There is no definite reason – rather, a rhetoric is constructed so as to appeal to a position Deleuze and Guattari have chosen because they happen to desire it – a kind of irrationalist argument.
How I feel about each of these:
1. Personally I prefer the Stirnerian reading, certainly as the most valid of the arguments (or the one I find most persuasive I might say). This argument is contingent on the empirical thesis regarding the structure of reactive desire (that it is inherently self-contradictory), but if this thesis is accepted as empirically valid, the preference for active desire follows rather logically. That one should care about the creation of a social context in which one can pursue active desires, certainly follows rather logically from the position of having active desires.
2. The ontological argument does pop up implicitly in Deleuze’s solo works (not as far as I know in his works with Guattari), and seems to be his initial reason for following this path (whatever his later reasons for sticking to it). Personally I think this is a rather weak argument because it doesn’t really explain why each of us should take on the commitment to do what “being” requires of us. I wonder if it doesn’t also require a molar referent the same way the Althusserian version does. It’s also rather dependent on a set of first premises which are rather open to “take it or leave it” assessments – I’m not sure whether people could in fact be convinced of such claims about the nature of being, or indeed whether one could give a doubter sufficient reasons that should convince them (maybe I’ve spent too long reading Rawls on comprehensive doctrines). I’d suggest acceptance of such a Deleuzian ontological view is sufficient, but not necessary, to accept the Deleuzian preference for active desire.
3. I find the Althusserian reading unpersuasive as it requires a persistence of a Hegelian theory of history within Deleuzian theory which Althusser and Negri (despite their anti-Hegelianism) had clearly maintained in their reading of Marx, but which Deleuze and Guattari unambiguously reject. Also, I’ve never understood how this argument is meant to be decisive – obviously it depends on a lot of other propositions to make the transition from “history is tending towards X” to “X should be ethically affirmed” (Marxists either don’t bother making these intermediate steps or hide them in their theory of history).
4. The consequentialist argument is a very strong argument in terms of its political usefulness, and the one I’ve had most cause to deploy in discussions with non-Deleuzians, but this is probably because of the pervasiveness of consequentialism in everyday ethics. It certainly holds logically and up to a point exegetically (it is true that if everyone lived a Deleuzian way they’d be happier and less alienated and so on; it is also true that the possibility of qualitatively greater pleasures and intensities is an argument Deleuze and Guattari deploy), but I wonder if it isn’t something of a “suicide” of consequentialism – it requires the affirmation of non-denumerable forces and hence the negation of the “balancing-scales” of costs and benefits. Also I don’t get the sense that for Deleuze and Guattari the preference for “schizorevolutionary” over “microfascist” assemblages would be at all affected if someone was to discover that fascists have more fun, or, say, that hierarchically-ordered systems generate greater per capita GDP. Their response could be that these are ‘lesser’ pleasures outweighed by the qualitatively greater intensity of active forces; or that they are ethically valueless pleasures because the system which generates them is unjustified on other grounds; or that these criteria are not relevant, or not of great relevance, to the ethical question of which system to support. I think any of these responses would take them off the terrain of consequentialism strictly speaking – in the first place rather less obviously, but the introduction of qualitative criteria basically contradicts its usual approach – one would have to determine that some consequences are qualitatively more ethically relevant than others based on something other than consequences.
5. The therapeutic argument is made in various texts, particularly the last section of Anti-Oedipus, but again I’d wonder if Deleuze and Guattari would actually want to make their argument dependent on whether people turn out happier if they adopt active positions –there are possibly cases where a lone individual could be made more unhappy in an overwhelmingly repressive context. One could revert again to the ‘qualitative’ argument but with the same problems as above. Another point here is that one finds references to cruelty, violence, and so on in Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments as elements of deterritorialisation – being deterritorialised on a molar level might be a cause of suffering for the person concerned. It also seems rather paradoxical to be arguing from the welfare of a molar self in favour of a position of breaking down the molar self.
6. The naturalist argument is plausible at first sight but dubious given the critical remarks they occasionally make about Reich, on exactly this point. It seems to imply a “molar” formulation of “human nature”, whereas what Deleuze and Guattari affirm is simultaneously affirmative and differential (and unrepresentable).
7. The irrationalist argument again sounds plausible at first sight, but would seem to imply a neutrality towards ontology and a reduction of everything to discourse in a linguistic sense, neither of which are Deleuzian positions.