I am going with images of conflict for this one
As I have remarked here earlier, and in a published piece, one of the things that it is surprising about Frédéric Lordon's work on the organization of desire in capitalism is that he does not mention Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. The omission is striking because of their shared problem, the organization of desire under capitalism, and even their shared reference, Spinoza. As I wrote in the piece in the Affect Theory Reader 2:
"There have been two returns to Spinoza in the last fifty years that have argued in different ways that Spinoza’s account of desire and the affects is uniquely situated to examine the way in which capitalism restructures desires and joys as much as beliefs and ideas. These particular interventions function as theoretical stepping stones connecting the concerns of the seventeenth century to the present, the domination of religion to capitalism as the religion of daily life. I am referring first to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia originally published in 1972 and 1980, which made Spinoza’s question the central question of political philosophy, arguing that desire is central to any political or economic order. Deleuze and Guattari formed their understanding of desire and the economy at a tumultuous period in which desire and its liberation was at the center of counter-cultural movements around the globe, movements which resisted a life realized in terms of work and consumption. Some forty years later, in 2010, Frédéric Lordon returned to Marx and Spinoza, in some sense bypassing Deleuze and Guattari’s work, to argue that "Capitalism must be seized…as a particular regime of desire.." For Lordon, Spinoza’s understanding of conatus, striving, at the base of individual and collective life, makes it possible to examine the way in which different regimes of accumulation are also different regimes of striving, or desire. Lordon’s assertion comes in a different era, one not marked by students seeking to liberate their desires from the conventions of society but by capitalists claiming that the surest path to success was to follow one’s desires, converting passions into profits. Despite their different orientations, and historical moments, the particular revivals of Spinoza in Deleuze and Guattari and Lordon attest to not only the contemporary relevance of Spinoza, but to what could be called the importance of affective reproduction in both economics and politics; the way in which affects are as integral to the production and reproduction of the economic and political order as ideas and ideologies."
That is a long quote, but I think that it is worth not just thinking in terms of Lordon's omission of Deleuze and Guattari, but also the very different question of desire from 1968 until now. As Lordon has insisted again and again, capitalism increasingly presents itself as the realization of our desires, especially as the existing regime of work tells to find our passions and put them to work. Deleuze is not entirely absent from Lordon's writing, in Vivre Sans Lordon criticizes Deleuze's politics, but the fundamental issue of their intersecting conceptions of desire and its relation to Spinoza is not centrally discussed.
With the publication of Pulsion (co-authored with Sandra Lucbert) this omission comes to an end. The final chapter of this book, at least before the two appendixes, is titled "Deleuze as a Reactive (and as Conclusion)." Before I say something about this critique of Deleuze it is worth saying something more about this book. It is a massive tome, something close to six hundred pages. The task of this book is to understand the fundamental problems of capitalism and fascism, and to understand what drives them, this brings us to the title, and topic, pulsion or the drives and desire. Lordon and Lucbert's method in dealing with the question of drives is both "geometrical and materialist."There is an apparent contradiction between these two methods. Geometrical follows Spinoza in grasping the "causal chains that make up the fundamental logic of psychic life." However, this general logic must be followed in all of its ramifications into their specific articulation in terms of social structures and institutions, hence geometrical and materialist. The contradiction between these two methods is only apparent, a geometry of desire must explain its relation to social relations and their reproduction, must be materialist.
This is not the only, or most important contradiction. There is also a contradiction, or at least an apparent one, between psychoanalysis and Spinoza. This already makes a point of divergence between Lordon and Lucbert and Deleuze and Guattari. While Spinoza is relatively absent from Anti-Oedipus, appearing by name primarily in terms of the central question which structures the book, why do people fight for servitude as if salvation, the book is animated by a Spinozist opposition to psychoanalysis that posits desire as production, as infinite productivity, against the latter's insistence on lack. This question comes up in Pulsion as well, how is it possible to reconcile an ontology of infinite productivity with desire understood as predicated around a constitutive lack.
To some extent Lordon's and Lucbert's response to this, consistent with Lordon's earlier work, is anthropological rather than ontological. They posit the human condition as being finite-not-finite (fini pas fini). Which is to say that human beings are both affected, determined by their conditions, but never completely determined in such a way that we could know in advance. (This is similar to a point that André Tosel makes about Spinoza as a thinker of both finitude and the infinite productivity of nature as two sides of our existence). As Lordon and Lucbert clarify finite-not-finite in the glossary at the end of the book:
Fini-pas-fini: finite designates the finitude of the human mode, not-finite its incompleteness due to the great prematurity in which it comes into the world, devoid of instinctual wiring. An incompleteness which, unlike that of animals, will never be filled by the subsequent development of the mode.
I would call this formulation "Freudian-Spinozist" in that it captures both the fundamental condition of being a mode with that of Freud's idea of fundamental prematurity. The specific mode in which humans live out this finite-not-finite existence is that we live in and through social relations, in society in a given culture. Second nature is our nature. As Lordon and Lucbert write, "This is the fundamental problem of the human condition. Being finite not finite and having to articulate with others, according to the historical way in which others have already organized themselves for this purpose: there is no human mode that does not have to unfold in these universal coordinates."
Much of the books chapters articulate these different coordinates, the way that different societies can be understood to be articulations of desire, affects, and the imagination. There is much to be said about these chapters, specifically the discussion of the symbolic, and all in all Lordon's book with Sandra Lucbert takes the relatively schematic and sometimes even simplistic organization of desire that Lordon had worked with, and expands its coordinates to be a much more complex picture of psychic life. However, one of the specific questions of these chapters returns us to the relation with Deleuze and Guattari and that has to do with the nature of lack. On one fundamental level Lordon and Lucbert agree with Deleuze and Guattari that "lack" is socially produced. However, this social production has as its fundamental condition the lack of organization and structure that comes to being human. Finite not finite is a structural condition, a geometry, that projects its incompleteness onto some object, some goal. The specific nature of this goal is entirely historical, entirely social, but the condition of this object of desire, this desiderium is prior to all social relations. As Lordon and Lucbert write,
"The order of understanding also explains that the real lacks nothing and that the human finite mode necessarily forms the imagination of lack. In any case, when Deleuze and Guattari write "We know well where lack comes from... Lack is arranged, organized in social production" we do not follow them. That the social code, especially capitalist, knows how to make lack prosper in minds is quite certain. However, it only prospers so well when grafted onto an original, universal structure, prior to any social codification, the structure of the principal desiderium : it is born, and it is loss, this under all horizons. Imaginary loss without doubt - but real imaginary production."
The question of psychoanalysis always seems to come down to this question of a universal structure and its social organization, or, in Lordon and Lucbert's terms, geometry or materialism. What of our existence is a necessary condition of being human, of being finite, part of our geometry, and what is a contingent product of our social existence, and could be arranged otherwise, part of our being not-finite, part of our material condition. I am not sure if such a question is ever resolvable, like many questions about "human nature" it hinges on precisely on that ultimately unknowable object of a human being outside of any social relations. Generally, and this explains much of my antipathy to psychoanalysis, I think that the radical, or perhaps utopian, response to that question is to refuse all necessity until proven otherwise. The alternative is all too often to accept contingent matters of our social order as necessary conditions of our existence. Those who are psychoanalytically inclined have a habit of going from the lack that is constitutive of human existence to argue for the necessity of two genders, or some other such bullshit. I should be clear that this is my criticism of psychoanalysis in general, and not Lordon and Lucbert's book. One of the surprising things about this book, at least to me who is more familiar with Lordon's work than Lucbert's, is how feminist it is. There are long discussions of Monique Wittig, Gayle Rubin, and Judith Butler, and this discussion is framed around trying to understand patriarchy as a form of desire.
Lordon and Lucbert's second critique of Deleuze and Guattari is more pressing. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari contrast this organization of desire with its attendant lack with the Body without Organs, a desire without organization. Lordon and Lucbert argue that this notion is profoundly anti-Spinozist. "La voie Spinoza n'est pas la voie schizo." For Spinoza desire is always already organized, organized at the individual level in a specific body, a specific ingenium, but also at the social level, a particular imperium. These are less two separate things, the individual and society, than they are two different way of grasping the same thing, the same transindividual relation (If I may interject that term).
This critique follows Lordon's earlier criticism of Deleuze and Guattari, that Deleuze's politics of how to make oneself a body without organs, of deterritorialization, etc., are ultimately an anti-politics, a refusal to think organization, not just organization in the political sense of a protest or a union, but the way in which we are always already organized in terms of our imagination and desire. As Lordon and Lucbert write,
"No one, animal or human, lives naked. While the necessity of nature directly produces, and incorporates, animal mediation, it needs a special extension in the case of humans, where mediation is collectively (socially) produced, as it were in exteriority, before descending into bodies. For the moment, however, this difference is still secondary: here the important point is that human life and animal life are equally mediated."
I agree with this point, but it seems to me, to draw these two criticisms together in opposite ways, the challenge of radical thought is to at once recognize that we are always already organized, organized down to our desire and affects, but that these organizations have to be recognized as historical, contingent, without any claim to necessity beyond that. In closing I would say that it is the challenge of radical politics that is more pressing, how to create the conditions for a different organization, a different way of living and thinking, from within the existing organization, to create transformation.
No comments:
Post a Comment