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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Empire: Deleuze & desire « Previous | |Next »
May 26, 2004

If we go along with Hardt and Negri's claim that Foucault failed to grasp the real dynamics of production in biopolitical society, what then? Where do we go? What do we do?

A familar move is made. We turn to Deleuze and Guattari. Dam. I have to read Deleuze and Guattari again. I struggled through Anti-Oedipus and recoiled from A Thousand Plateaus in a reading group a couple of years ago. I'd rather not re-read those texts. They are difficult, the language was unfamilar and full of neologisms, whist their work (particularly A Thousand Plateaus) lacked a coherent argument or structure.

Hardt and Negri say that we need to turn to these two thinkers because:


"Deleuze and Guattari present us with a properly poststructuralist understanding of biopower that renews materialist thought and grounds itself solidly in the question of the production of social being. They focus our attention clearly on the ontological substance of social production. Machines produce. The constant functioning of social machines in their various apparatuses and assemblages produces the world along with the subjects and objects that constitute it."

Okay I accept that Deleuze is a political philosopher who regards society as a machine, that he regards philosophy as a political activity, and that philosophy should respond to problems that are posed outside the academy. They are anti-capitalist but non-Marxist because they reject the Marxist's mode of production approach to history in favour of abstract machines of desires and power.

From what I remember of Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guatarri understand desire in terms of process of social production. So we have the control, coordination and coding of desire. If all social relations are power relations and desire relations, then we can look at social institutions in terms of both their networks of power and circuits of desire.

Desire is not a drive in the Freudian sense, nor structure in the Saussurian model of language. It is about bodies, energies and connections and investments between and within bodies Desire is treated as a primary active force, as a process of production, involves intensities, is present in given assemblages and produces reality.

So a striking political aspects of this text is its refusal of "traditional" Marxist understandings of U.S. imperialism. Hardt and Negri contest the assumption that any nation-state, even the U.S., can act as a centre for an imperialist project today.They challenge the assumption of philosophy.com that the nation-state to protect can protect us against the dynamics of global capital. This is a post-Seattle wave of thinking that rejects a localist opposition to globalisation because it rests on false assumptions.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:51 PM | | Comments (2)
Comments

Comments

It seems to me the better question is why should we go along with Hardt and Negri on this point? There seems to me to be a little bit of a debate between Foucault and Deleuze/Guattari on precisely this ponit that doesn't appear much in the secondary literature and which Hardt and Negri seem to avoid taking full account of: namely, that Deleuze/Guattari argue that capitalism is required for bio-power to get going, while Foucault argues that it is the other way around (see section 5 of History of Sexuality). Hardt/Negri seem to take Deleuze/Guattari for granted on this point.

Chris,
if I am reading Empire right, then we are already living within, and being shaped by the dynamics of global capitalism.

This means that for us today it does matter that biopower requires capitalism to get off the ground, or that it is the other way round.

Both rare working together today. We are enmeshed in both.So purely economic accounts based around capital flows and the market competition are inadequate.