The
Ongoing "Soft Revolution"
by Slavoj Žižek
In his admirable "The Pedagogy
of Philosophy," Jean-Jacques Lecercle described the scene of a yuppie
on the Paris underground reading Deleuze and Guattari's What Is
Philosophy?
The incongruity of
the scene induces a smile–after all, this is a book explicitly written
against yuppies. . . . Your smile turns into a grin as you imagine that
this enlightenment-seeking yuppie bought the book because of its title.
. . . Already you see the puzzled look on the yuppie's face, as he
reads page after page of vintage Deleuze.1
What, however, if there is no
puzzled look, but enthusiasm, when the yuppie reads about impersonal
imitation of affects, about the communication of affective intensities
beneath the level of meaning ("Yes, this is how I design my
publicities!"), or when he reads about exploding the limits of
self-contained subjectivity and directly coupling man to a machine
("This reminds me of my son's favorite toy, the action-man that can
turn into a car!"), or about the need to reinvent oneself permanently,
opening oneself up to a multitude of desires that push us to the limit
("Is this not the aim of the virtual sex video game I am working on
now? It is no longer a question of reproducing sexual bodily contact
but of exploding the confines of established reality and imagining new,
unheard-of intensive modes of sexual pleasures!"). There are,
effectively, features that justify calling Deleuze the ideologist of
late capitalism. Is the much celebrated Spinozan imitatio afecti,
the impersonal circulation of affects bypassing persons, not the very
logic of publicity, of video clips, and so on, where what matters is
not the message about the product, but the intensity of the transmitted
affects and perceptions? Furthermore, recall again the hard-core
pornography scenes in which the very unity of the bodily
self-experience is magically dissolved, so that the spectator perceives
the bodies as a kind of vaguely coordinated agglomerate of partial
objects. Is this logic where we are no longer dealing with persons
interacting, but just with the multiplicity of intensities, of places
of enjoyment, plus bodies as a collective/impersonal desiring machine,
not eminently Deleuzian?
And, to go even a step further, is the practice of
fist-fucking not the
exemplary case of what Deleuze called the "expansion of a concept?" The
fist is put to a new use; the notion of penetration is expanded into
the combination of the hand with sexual penetration, into the
exploration of the inside of a body. No wonder Foucault, Deleuze's
Other, was practicing fisting: is fist-fucking not the sexual invention
of the twentieth century, a new model of eroticism and pleasure? It is
no longer genitalized, but focused just on the penetration of the
surface, with the role of the phallus being taken over by the hand, the
autonomized partial object par excellence. And, what about the
so-called Transformer or animorph toys, a car or a plane that can be
transformed into a humanoid robot, an animal that can be morphed into a
human or robot. Is this not Deleuzian? There are no "metaphorics" here;
the point is not that the machinic or animal form is revealed as a mask
containing a human shape but, rather, the existence of the
becoming-machine or becoming-animal of the human, the flow of
continuous morphing. What is blurred here is also the divide
machine/living organism: a car transmutes into a humanoid/cyborg
organism. And, is the ultimate irony not that, for Deleuze, the sport
was surfing, a Californian sport par excellence if there ever was one?
No longer a sport of self-control and domination directed towards some
goal, it is just a practice of inserting oneself into a wave and
letting oneself be carried by it.2
Brian Massumi formulated clearly this deadlock, which is based on the
fact that today's capitalism already overcame the logic of totalizing
normality and adopted the logic of the erratic excess:
the more varied,
and even erratic, the better. Normalcy starts to lose its hold. The
regularities start to loosen. This loosening of normalcy is part of
capitalism's dynamic. It's not a simple liberation. It's capitalism's
own form of power. It's no longer disciplinary institutional power that
defines everything, it's capitalism's power to produce variety–because
markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a niche market.
The oddest of affective tendencies are okay–as long as they pay.
Capitalism starts intensifying or diversifying affect, but only in
order to extract surplus-value. It hijacks affect in order to intensify
profit potential. It literally valorises affect. The capitalist logic
of surplus-value production starts to take over the relational field
that is also the domain of political ecology, the ethical field of
resistance to identity and predictable paths. It's very troubling and
confusing, because it seems to me that there's been a certain kind of
convergence between the dynamic of capitalist power and the dynamic of
resistance.3
So, when Naomi Klein writes
that "neo-liberal economics is biased at every level towards
centralization, consolidation, homogenization. It is a war waged on
diversity,"4 is she not focusing
on a
figure of capitalism whose days are numbered? Would she not be
applauded by contemporary capitalist modernizers? Is not the latest
trend in corporate management itself "diversify, devolve power, try to
mobilize local creativity and self-organization?" Is not
anticentralization the topic of the "new" digitalized capitalism? The
problem here is even more "troubling and confusing" than it may appear.
As Lacan pointed out apropos of his deployment of the structural
homology between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment, what if the
surplus-value does not simply "hijack" a preexisting relational field
of affects. What if what appears an obstacle is effectively a positive
condition of possibility, the element that triggers and propels the
explosion of affective productivity? What if, consequently, one should
precisely throw out the baby with the bath water and renounce the very
notion of erratic affective productivity, and so on as the libidinal
support of revolutionary activity?
More than ever, capital is
the "concrete universal" of our historical epoch. What this means is
that, while it remains a particular formation, it overdetermines all
alternative formations, as well as all noneconomic strata of social
life. The twentieth-century communist movement emerged, defining itself
as an opponent of capitalism, and was defeated by it; Fascism emerged
as an attempt to master capitalism's excesses, to build a kind of
capitalism without capitalism. For this reason, it is also much too
simple, in a Heideggerian mood, to reduce capitalism to one of the
ontic realizations of a more fundamental ontological attitude of will
to power and technological domination (claiming that the alternatives
to it remain caught within this same ontological horizon). Modern
technological domination is inextricably intertwined with the social
form of capital; it can only occur within this form, and, insofar as
the alternative social formations display the same ontological
attitude, this merely confirms that they are, in their innermost core,
mediated by capital as their concrete universality, as the particular
formation that colors the entire scope of alternatives, that is, that
functions as the encompassing totality mediating all other particular
formations. In his new book on modernity, Fredric Jameson offers a
concise critique of the recently fashionable theories of "alternate
modernities":
How then can the
ideologues of 'modernity' in its current sense manage to distinguish
their product–the information revolution, and globalized, free-market
modernity–from the detestable older kind, without getting themselves
involved in asking the kinds of serious political and economic,
systemic questions that the concept of a postmodernity makes
unavoidable? The answer is simple: you talk about 'alternate' or
'alternative' modernities. Everyone knows the formula by now: this
means that there can be a modernity for everybody which is different
from the standard or hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model. Whatever you dislike
about the latter, including the subaltern position it leaves you in,
can be effaced by the reassuring and 'cultural' notion that you can
fashion your own modernity differently, so that there can be a
Latin-American kind, or an Indian kind or an African kind, and so on. .
. . But this is to overlook the other fundamental meaning of modernity
which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself.5
As Jameson is well aware, the
line goes on and on, up to those Muslims who dream about a specific
Arab modernity that would magically bypass the destructive aspects of
the Western global capitalism. The significance of this critique
reaches far beyond the case of modernity; it concerns the fundamental
limitation of the nominalist historicizing. The recourse to multitude
("there is not one modernity with a fixed essence, there are multiple
modernities, each of them irreducible to others") is false not because
it does not recognize a unique fixed "essence" of modernity, but
because multiplication functions as the disavowal of the antagonism
that inheres to the notion of modernity as such; the falsity of
multiplication resides in the fact that it frees the universal notion
of modernity of its antagonism, of the way it is embedded in the
capitalist system, by relegating this aspect just to one of its
historical subspecies. And, insofar as this inherent antagonism could
be designated as a "castrative" dimension, and, furthermore, insofar
as, according to Freud, the disavowal of castration is represented as
the multiplication of the phallus-representatives (a multitude of
phalluses signals castration, the lack of the one), it is easy to
conceive such a multiplication of modernities as a form of fetishist
disavowal. This logic holds also for other ideological notions,
especially, today, for democracy. Do those who want to distinguish
another ("radical") democracy from its existing form and thereby cut
off its links with capitalism, not commit the same categorical mistake?
At this point, one should
introduce the difference between the works of Deleuze himself and the
popular field of Deleuzianism: which of the two is the true target of
our critique? The primary target is the popular version of
"Deleuzianism" because it goes without saying that Deleuze's thought is
ridiculously simplified in its popular acceptance, so that it is easy
to play the game of "things are much more complex in Deleuze"; however,
if there is something to be learned from the history of thought, from
Christianity to Marx and Heidegger, it is that the roots of
misappropriations are to be sought in the "original" thinker himself.
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