deleuzeneoliberalism

7/31/2019 deleuzeneoliberalism

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Jack Patterson

5/17/12

Deleuze and American Neoliberalism

Gilles Deleuzes work on capitalism has a lot to offer contemporary analysis of

neoliberalism and the financial crisis. His work with Guattari inA Thousand Plateauspursued a

definition of capitalism adequate to the times, including a consideration of the increasing

abstraction of labor and the rise of globalization. Since Deleuze considered both he and Guattari to

have remained Marxists (Negotiations: 171), their work inA Thousand Plateaus can be taken as

a kind of heavily modified Marxian analysis of capital. Not only prescient with regard to lately

emerging trends in the world economy, Deleuzes work also has a lot to offer the political

dimension of contemporary capitalism, although not directly in terms of public policy, but rather

through an affective intervention.

Deleuze, of course, uses Marx without subscribing to Marxs weaker philosophical

assumptions. Deleuze rejects the Hegelian dialectic view of history close to the heart of Marx,

because for Deleuze there is nothing historically determined or determinable. In their non-

evolutionist, genealogical account of the progression of capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari believe

that history can in fact be understood in the light of capitalism, but only if capitalism is taken to be

an aleatory universal history, which may never have happened (the only universal history is the

history of contingency [Anti-Oedipus 224]). Capitalism only came into being, in their account,

through the meeting of free labor and independent capital: Capitalism forms when the flow of

unqualified wealth encounters the flow of unqualified labor and conjugates with it (ATP453).

In their genealogical account of capitalism, capitalism forms by way of a specific type of

social organization of flows. Previous societies operated only by means of overcoding, i.e., the

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fixing of certain ways of living and existing according to a set of transcendent laws -- for example,

the archaic imperial State overcodes the way of life of agricultural communities (428).

Capitalism, as a state proceeding after the imperial-despotic State, is the exception to this rule:

instead of working by overcoding flows, capitalism is a regime of constant decoding, and operates

by an axiomatic as opposed to laws; an axiomatic deals directly with purely functional elements

and relations whose nature is not specified, while codes are relative to domains and express

specific relations between qualified elements (454). The capitalist axiomatic is, of course, to

ultimately equate everything with money. The concept of the axiomatic is clearly influenced by the

passage from the Communist Manifesto in which Marx describes the novel conditions of the

bourgeois epoch: All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable

prejudices and opinions, are swept away. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is

profaned... (Marx 476). The universal equivalence of money empties flows of their originally

belief-laden meanings and turns them into mere money relations. What is particularly important for

the present paper is that, though Deleuze and Guattari believe capitalism works by continually

decoding flows, continually displacing its own limits, it is not possible for capitalism to entirely

decode all flows. According to Jonathan Roffe, this is impossible: There can be no total decoded

society -- an oxymoronic phrase (Roffe 41). For example, there are structures of State society that

are alive in capitalism, as well as structures of religion and the family. Even if these structures are

still present, they may be fundamentally alteredby capitalism -- they may have conjoined with

capitalism in some sense (as inAnti-Oedipus, where the family is a micro version of capitalist

social relations).

For Deleuze and Guattari, this manifests itself in the assertion that States in advanced

capitalism become are very different than they used to be before capital; they become conduits for

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the capitalist axiomatic: the States...are not canceled out but change form and take on a new

meaning: models of realization for a worldwide axiomatic that exceeds them (ATP454). A

strikingly accurate picture of the 21st century globalized capitalist economy emerges: Today we

can depict an enormous, so-called stateless, monetary mass that circulates through foreign

exchange and across borders, eluding control by the States, forming a multinational ecumenical

organization, constituting a de facto supernational power untouched by governmental decisions

(ATP453). This concept of the modified capitalist State is also interesting because it denies that

different governmental orientations could support a non-capitalist economy -- they can be

democratic, totalitarian, even socialist, and remain capitalist (ATP447). This is because capital has

flown so far and so deeply that nowhere is untouched by it. States in this view are capitalistically

similar by a kind ofisomorphy but not a homogeneity -- they contribute to the same global capital

but are not all identical, and therefore can have many formal variations (ATP456).

Another important divergence from Marxism in Deleuze and Guattari should be added: in

Deleuze and Guattari there is certainly a diminished sense of a purely exploiting class and a purely

exploited class. From a standpoint within the capitalist mode of production, it is very difficult to

say who is the thief and who the victim, or even where the violence resides. ...It is a violence that

posits itself as preaccomplished, even though it is reactivated every day (ATP447). This is not

only a preaccomplished violence, but also one with extremely diverse and diffuse forms of

operation. In a sense, we are no longer living in the world of naked, shameless, direct, brutal

exploitation described by Marx in theManifesto (Marx 475); there are much more complex forms

of class that exist and are engendered by complex divisions of labor. Deleuze and Guattari describe

two coexistent forms of exploitation of human labor: machinic enslavement and social subjection.

Nicholas Thoburn describes the two concepts as follows: the functioning of the axiomatic through

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abstract quanta (turning a force into a determined comparable conjunction) is the element of

machinic enslavement, and the production of the molar aggregate out of this (the personified

capitalist, the worker) is social subjection... (Thoburn, 95). In other words, machinic enslavement,

grossly simplified, is something like the physical, machinic relation of the person to the larger

operations of capital, while social subjection has to do with the persons sense of identity and

motivation with regard to the larger productive and consumptive roles s/he plays. So a picture

emerges that is more complex than popular depictions of programmed consumers -- media is not

only subjectivity-programming but also machinic enslavement; the subjective, affective dimensions

of socialization are coextensive with machinic enslavement, and they work together to uphold the

greater division of labor. Deleuze and Guattari describe machinic enslavement with regard to

television: one is enslaved by TV insofar as the television viewers are no longer consumers or

users, nor even subjects who supposedly make it, but intrinsic component pieces, input and

output, feedback or recurrences that are no longer connected to the machine in such a way as to

produce or use it (ATP458). Social subjection and machinic enslavement are more concretely

interesting in the analysis of the role of business in contemporary capitalism. Deleuze described

in his later theories of control societies a kind of business that permeated everyday life, with its

ludicrous challenges, competitions, and seminars (Negotiations, 179), creating a mode of

production that heavily relied on marketing-- what Thoburn calls a sign of the businesss free

floating ability to discern and require a wealth of activities through its permeation and intimate

control of social life, and its understanding of the variation and potential of activity that its data

banks provide (Thoburn, 99). This conception of business does many things: it reconfigures the

role of consumption and production; it problematizes the distinctions between exploiters and

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exploited and between work and life; and it destabilizes the clean dichotomy between agency and

structure.

An important question to ask of a Deleuzian theory of contemporary capitalism is: what is

politics, and how is it commensurable with capitalism? It is certain that, in Deleuzes view, politics

is not narrowly identifiable with government or public policy. Given the fact that governments are

nothing more than models of realization for a worldwide axiomatic that exceeds them, policy

deliberation could be said to have much less value under capitalism than it would in an ideal world

where states could actually fully control market impulses. Keynesian compromises and state

controls of the market were implemented in the 20th century, but it can be argued that their

implementation did nothing to actually slow down capitalism -- and regardless, the prospects of a

revival of Keynesian policies are extremely dim in the United States. Taking into account at the

very least the practical difficulty of undertaking policy reform under these conditions, one

imagines a different kind of politics, one more subterranean than policy reform, oriented toward a

kind of affective intervention. If one considers states as merely conduits for the flow of capital,

then the project of politics must become more molecular, something more akin to Lyotards

libidinal economy (founded on desire and affective investments in the social field). For Deleuze,

real politics is about a breakdown of molar aggregates, opening up of lines of flight for new types

of personal becomings. His defense of the minority proposes a kind of becoming everybody

against the stratified forms of identity that form the logic of the majority (ATP105); becoming

everybody would enable one to actdifferently and be differently, and this is why it is political -- it

would allow more possibilities for life. An ideal political project for Deleuze would involve the

ability to consistently experiment on oneself and understand the reality of continual difference.

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Thoburn says that actually existing politics has so often occurred through regimes of truth

and certainty that it has been characterized as much by dogma and ressentimentas by

experimentation and creation (139). In other words, the way people operate within the libidinal

economy is quite often marked by reductive, limiting, majoritarian tendencies -- exactly the things

that a Deleuzian politics would confront.

A case in point is the way right-wing ideology operates in the United States. As William

Connolly conceives it (his arguments here a bit simplified), many people in the contemporary

capitalist world want to uphold reactionary values as a response to the speeding-up of time, and

experience time teleologically rather than disjunctively; this leads them to majoritarian, dogmatic

thinking and a bigoted conception of the minor. In America, this manifests itself in xenophobia and

American exceptionalism -- in part because people consider America to be destined for greatness

(this is their teleology). Connolly argues that anxiety provoked by whatever time-speeding factor

contributes as well to an evangelical-capitalist assemblage, that manifests itself, among other

things, in support for preemptive wars; in tolerance or much worse of state practices of torture

that negate the Geneva Conventions, and in propagating a climate of fear and loathing against the

Islamic world (Connolly 2008: 40), not to mention extreme market apologism and market

manipulation.

Connolly believes that ressentimentis a big part of this assemblage; that the capitalist-

evangelical machine foments a cultural ethos of existential resentment. He thus argues that there

need be a deeper conception of politics in order to better treat this resentment: The rest of us too

often restrict ourselves to policy questions and rational persuasion, ignoring the need to engage the

spiritual dimension of life under altered conditions of being (Connolly 2008: 63). In other words,

a deeper, affective dimension of politics that encouraged people to come to terms with difference

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would open people up to different possibilities of life, and break down their stable conceptions of

time, identity and causality; he writes inNeuropolitics that unless essentially embodied human

beings cast off the weight of a teleological experience of time they are unlikely to come to terms

with the element of contingency and fluidity in cultural identity (Connolly 2002: 174).

These affect-related threads will be resumed below, but first it will be useful to look at

what is happening to the world economy today. Labor is becoming increasingly superfluous in the

United States, in part because jobs are being exported for extremely cheap labor abroad, and more

importantly because technology is increasing efficiency so much that human labor power is

becoming useless. Direct human labor power, especially in the United States, is almost

unnecessary. The United States is swaddled in debt, and the performance of the U.S. GDP has

weakened considerably in the last decade.

According to Grard Dumnil and Dominique Lvy, this situation of privation in the

United States (as well as Europe) was never supposed to arise. The first worlds trade with the so-

called Third World was meant to be productive for the first world, not destructive:

...each country was supposed to occupy its own specific place in the international

division of labor, within large zones of free trade or a world totally open to the

international flows of commodities and capitals. Countries of the periphery were

expected to specialize in activities in which they are more performing. Thus, the

periphery would be able to supply cheap commodities to the center and offer

profitable opportunities to investors -- in other words, the best of the neoliberal

imperial worlds (Dumnil and Lvy, 324)

But instead, there is a great deal of privation at home. Americans are being forced to

confront what Connolly calls a haunting discrepancy between the American dream of abundance

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expressed in films ... and the difficulty that many have in making ends meet as they participate in

the available infrastructure of consumption (Connolly 2008: 62). In a strikingly prescient passage

fromA Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe this phenomenon encountered as a

result of trade between global capitalisms center and periphery:

It could even be said that the [worldwide] periphery and center exchange

terminations: deterriorialization of the center, a decoding of the center in relation to

national and territorial aggregates, cause the peripheral formations to become true

centers of investment, while the central formations peripheralize... The more the

worldwide axiomatic installs high industry and highly industrialized agriculture at

the periphery provisionally reserving for the center so-called postindustrial

activities (automation, electronics, information technologies...), the more it installs

peripheral zones of underdevelopment inside the center, internal Third Worlds,

internal Souths. Masses of the population are abandoned to erratic work

(subcontracting, temporary work, or work in the underground economy)... (ATP,

469)

According to Dumenil and Levy, taking into consideration the dwindling of United

States GDP performance among other factors, the current neoliberal U.S. hegemony will

fall in a matter of time. To distinct degrees, depending on the course of events during the

forthcoming decades, a multipolar pattern of international hierarchies will gradually replace

the contemporary unipolar configuration (Dumnil and Lvy, 309). In their view, this

presents the question of whether countries such as China, Russia, India and Brazil will

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operate with the same unsustainable neoliberal logic or move towards more innovative

paths (Dumnil and Lvy, 325).

The evangelical-capitalist resonance machine may have to confront head-on the

spectre of failure which Connolly says it senses anxiously (and which it tries to ward off

through countermeasures such as the war on terror, etc.). All signs point to Americas

downfall as the center of the world market. This raises questions for Connollys pluralism:

would a confrontation with the reality of American unexceptionalism reduce the fever pitch

of the resonance machine and its xenophobia, Christian fundamentalism and market

apologism? Would the downfall of America lead some cowboy capitalists to begin

considering that some of their own assumptions about the market (maybe even those of

economics in general) are unsustainable and unethical? It is certainly possible. It seems, as

Connolly would suggest, that a radical existential (affective) reorientation is the only thing

that could change certain peoples minds -- rather than beingconvinced by rational

argument.

As Dumnil and Lvy point out, it is unclear what the emergence of these new

international hierarchies would do with regard to the current situation of neoliberalism.

Though American exceptionalism did a lot to incite the neoliberal crisis, there is nothing to

suggest that the fall of America would curtail any of the same tendencies in the world

market. Still, though it is possible that neoliberalism would be reined in or destroyed

entirely, there is apparently nothing on the horizon to radically alter the fundamental

motions of capitalism itself -- it may only be regulated to a greater degree.

Works Cited

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-Deleuze, Gilles.Negotiations: 1972 - 1990. trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia,

1995.

-Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari.Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans

Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. New York: The Viking Press, 1977.

-Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari.A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

-Dumnil, Grard and Dominique Lvy. The Crisis of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2011.

-Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader. ed. Robert C. Tucker. New

York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978.

-Thoburn, Nicholas.Deleuze, Marx and Politics. London: Routledge, 2003.

-Choat, Simon.Marx Through Post-Structuralism: Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze.

London: Continuum, 2010.

-Connolly, William.Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2002.

-Connolly, William. Capitalism and Christianity: American Style. Durham: Duke

University Press, 2008.

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