K – Cap vs Deleuze AffsCongratulations, you’ve done everything the neoliberal institutions you fight against want. You struggle, you rupture, you play the micropolitical game, and feed the systems of oppression that give you a place to speak in the first place. SinnerbrinkSinnerbrink 06—Department of Philosophy @ Macquarie University (Robert, 2006, Parrhesia, No. 1, “Nomadology or Ideology? Zizek’s Critique of Deleuze,” rmf)

While this might strike one as a rather tendentious charge, given the explicit critique of capitalism in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Zizek is nonetheless pointing to a real deadlock facing the Deleuzo-Guattarian proponent of affective micropolitics and virtual becomings. There are, I suggest, two related aspects of this deadlock, which is both theoretical and practical. The first is the internal theoretical problem that Zizek clearly identifies, namely the dualism between Deleuze I (the ontology of the immanent but fissured One, recalling Badiou’s critical response to Deleuze) and Deleuze II (the ontology of molecular becoming and desubjectified flows, which represents a concerted retreat from the nature of radical subjectivity). Presumably, for Zizek, Deleuze I’s ontology is more capable of thinking this radical subjectivity than is Deleuze II’s ontology, which represents a retreat from the abyss of negativity that is immanent to subjectivity as negativity. Yet having rejected the conceptual-ontological framework that would have allowed a thinking of this radical subjectivity, subjectivity as radical negativity of the immanent One, Deleuze (and Guattari) is forced to embrace the neoromantic figure of the dissolved nomadic subject, whose decoded flows and libidinal becomings would supposedly provide a radical political potential in the face of globalised capitalism. The problem is that such a figure of ‘desubjectified subjectivity’ is itself a figure of the concrete universality of global capitalism today. This brings us to the second aspect of this deadlock, the political deadlock inherent within contemporary capitalism itself. For the latter has clearly mastered what Marcuse and the Frankfurt School called

processes of “repressive desublimation,” the pseudo-emancipatory capture of libidinal energy by desire-driven consumer culture. Indeed, as Bernard Stiegler has recently argued, it is the phenomenological constitution of subjective experience, processes of individual and collective individuation that globalised capitalism now aims to capture and control, largely through cultural-technological networks and virtual imaginaries that process and manipulate consumer desire subjectively and collectively. This process occurs through what Stiegler has called the “synchronisation” of subjective experience, the technologically mediated selection of stereotypical images and affective responses that serve to bind libidinal energy for the purposes of enhanced consumption and political ideological manipulation .20 Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari could be said to have a

sympathetic relation to this post-Frankfurt school, Stieglerian critique of the instrumentalising of subjective experience through the synergy between consumer culture and global techno-capitalism. Indeed, Brian Massumi puts this challenge facing the Deleuzian critic of global capitalism

—namely the hijacking of affect for the purposes of consumption and profitability—very well: 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 kind of convergence between the dynamic of capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance .21 For Zizek, capitalism is the all-encompassing concrete universal of our

historical epoch, which means that, while it is a particular formation, “it overdetermines all alternative formations as well as all non-economic strata of social life” (OwB, 185). But this does not imply, contra Deleuze and Guattari, that the Deleuzo-Guattarian figures of nomadic subjectivity, molecular becomings, or affective politics provide the only viable strategies of resistance against the established global order. As Zizek points out, contemporary neo-

liberal economics is very far from being, as Naomi Klein asserts, “biased at every level towards centralization, consolidation, homogenisation. … a war waged against diversity”22 (OwB, 185). On the contrary, contemporary global capitalism thrives on the very deterritorialising dynamic that Klein, along with some contemporary DeleuzoGuattarians, sees as providing a vital source of micropolitical resistance to the global system . For Zizek, the important lesson here is that the appropriation of molecular becoming, impersonal affectivity, and other Deleuzian tropes into the dynamics of global capitalism—at level of the processing and management of subjective experience through the virtual vectors of media, marketing, and informational flows—means that we can no longer appeal to these tropes as part of any neo-romantic anti-capitalist critique . Far from presenting a marginalised or resistant mode of subjectivity, Deleuzian dissolved nomadic subjectivity

presents a neat ideological fit with the deterritorialised fluxes of global capitalism. Rather than celebrate bodily becomings, impersonal affects, and presubjective intensities as sources of theoretical and practical resistance, Zizek thus urges us to “renounce the very notion of erratic affective productivity as the libidinal support of revolutionary activity” (OwB, 185).

AND Their position necessarily begs the question – what would happen if we ran out of things to resist? Where would we get our fun? Resisting ideology through ideology guarantees that there will always be more to do, thus we can make an infinite number of changes at the symbolic level without ever disrupting the fundamental fantasy that makes it function, perpetuating and producing new violence. DeanDean, 06 (Jodi Dean is a professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.[1] She has also held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam “Zizek and politics” 2006 p28-29)

We can compare this scene from Glengarrv Glen Ross to President George W.[In] Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. In reporting on progress in the so-called war on terror, Bush lists some of those “we have arrcsted or otherwise dealt with,” speci fying some “key commanders of Al Qaida.” He continues, “All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.” I shuddered when I saw this speech. It has stuck with me, particularly because of Bush’s repulsive smirk. For me, it was not simply a matter of what I took to be Bush’s clear allusion to torture. Rather, it was the fact that he enjoyed it. His clear enjoyment when mentioning torture and death made the speech compelling and unbearable—horrifyi ng and unavoidable. Does it make sense to consider Bush’s speech in terms of dis placed enjoyment? A perhaps obvious reading would emphasize some viewers’ transference of a desire for revenge onto the President. He offers himself as an instrument of our will

and we want him to carry it out, to act in our stead, to do those illegal and murderous deeds because we cannot—even though we want to. In this instance, displacing our enjoyment over to Bush enables us to

avoid confronting it, to avoid acknowledging an illegality within law that we endorse. He acts, so that we remain passive . To be sure, not everyone who heard the speech agrees with Bush. Yet we are still transfixed—wherein lies our enjoyment? Perhaps we are captured by our own disavowed passivity . Bush’s speech enables me to be self-righteously horrified , to write letters to the editor, talk with friends and colleagues, and send money to Move On, all while denying the way that I am nonetheless trapped, unable actually to change a thing. And, perhaps, here “Bartleby politics” involves a shift in

perspective on precisely this trap, a turning of what appears to be an impossibility into the possibility that things might be otherwise, but a turn t hat cannot occur in the absence of a refusal to acknowledge our underlying passivity. I can imagine Republicans thrilled by the speech, but it is very difficult for me to imagine Democrats and progressives taking the difficult steps of organizing politically to impeach Bush, stop the war, and publicly recant previous

support for the war by admitting they were wrong. I can criticize the speech, and the policies and the man behind it, even as my true, passive position is caught in enjoyment, trapped by “Oh, this is so horrible, but it’s out of my hands, not my responsibility’55 In sum. as with the Baldwin example, the enjoyment in the Bush speech

is double: viewers transfer their enjoyment to Bush, remaining passive while he acts for them; or we pursue all sorts of activity, talking and criticizing, disavowing the fact that these activities are ineffectuaL56 We are transfixed, then, by the impossibility of the situation, by the way we are compelled to confront and disavow in the same moment the horrific fact of the law violating the law jòr us and in our stead. Those of us who oppose Bush and his war are compelled to confront and disavow in the same moment our own failure to act, our own sense of helpless entrapment. BEGIN FOOTNOTE Compare with 2ilek’s discussions of liberal intellectual fascination with nationalism: they “refuse it. mock it. laugh at it, yet at the same time stare at it with powerless fascination. The intellectual pleasure procured by denouncing nationalism is uncannily close to the satisfaction of successfully explaining one’s own impotence and failure:’ Tarrying with the Negative. p. 211. Hence. zizek holds the view that the “threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active,’ to participate.’ to mask the Nothingness of what goes on:’ Parallax View. p. 334.

The alternative is to give up the resistance of the 1AC. When we sacrifice our precious resistance it loses its capacity to fascinate us – like a pair of finger cuffs, the moment you stop fighting you can be free to create true political change. This is a pre-requisite for any true liberatory action. ZizekZizek, 06 (Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher and cultural critic. He is currently a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana in Slovenia “The Parallax view”, 332-340 )

How, then, do we find a way out of this deadlock? Balibar ends with an ambiguous reference to Mahatma Gandhi. It is true that Gandhi’s formula “Be yourself the change you would like to see in the world”

encapsulates perfectly the basic attitude of emancipatory change: do not wait for the “objective process” to generate the expected/desired change, since if you just wait for it, it will never come; instead, throw yourself into it, be this change, take the risk of enacting it directly upon yourself. Is not the ultimate limitation of Gandhi’s strategy,however, that it works only against a liberaldemocratic regime which abides by certain minimal ethico-political standards—in which, to put it in emotive terms, those in power still “have a conscience”? Recall Gandhi’s reply, in the late s, to the question of what the Jews in Germany should do against Hitler: they should commit mass suicide, and thus arouse the conscience of the world. . . .We can easily imagine the Nazi reaction to this: OK, we’ll help you— where do you want the poison delivered to? There is another way, however, in which Balibar’s plea for renouncing violence can be given a specific twist—that of what I am tempted to call Bartleby politics. Recall the two symmetrically opposed modes of the “living dead,” of finding oneself in the uncanny place “between the two deaths”: one is either biologically dead while symbolically alive (surviving one’s biological death as a spectral apparition or symbolic authority of the Name), or symbolically dead while biologically alive (those who are excluded from the sociosymbolic order, from Antigone to today’s Homo sacer).

And what if we apply the same logic to the opposition of violence and nonviolence, identifying two modes of their intersection?22 We all know the pop-psychological notion of “passive- aggressive behavior,” usually applied to a housewife who, instead of actively opposing her husband, passively sabotages him. And this brings us back to where we began: perhaps we should assert this attitude of passive aggression as a proper radical political gesture, in contrast to aggressive passivity , the standard “interpassive” mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time in order to make sure that nothing will happen , that nothing will really change. In such a constellation, the first truly critical

(“aggressive,” violent) s tep is to withdraw into passivity, to refuse to participate —Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is the necessary first step which, as it were, clears the ground, opens up the place, for true activity, for an act that will actually change the coordinates of the constellation . the obscene How does the counterpoint to Bartleby politics, the impotent passage à l’acte, look today? A classic Hollywood action film is always a good illustration.Toward the end of Andrew Davis’s The Fugitive, the innocent-persecuted doctor

(Harrison Ford) confronts at a large medical convention his colleague (Jeroem Kraabe), accusing him of falsifying medical data on behalf of a large pharmaceutical company.At this precise point, when we would expect a shift to the company—corporate capital—as the real culprit, Kraabe

interrupts his talk, invites Ford to step aside, and then, outside the convention hall, they engage in a passionate violent fight, beating one another until their faces are streaming with blood.The openly ridiculous character of this scene is revealing—it is as if, in order to get out of the ideological mess of playing with anticapitalism, one has to make a move which directly opens up the cracks in the narrative for all to see . Another aspect here is the transformation of the bad guy into a vicious, sneering, pathological character, as if psychological depravity (which accompanies the dazzling spectacle of the fight) should replace the anonymous

nonpsychological drive of capital: the much more appropriate gesture would have been to present the corrupt colleague as a psychologically sincere and privately honest doctor who, because of the financial difficulties of the hospital in which he works, was lured into swallowing the pharmaceutical company’s bait. Thus The Fugitive provides a clear instance of the violent passage à l’acte serving as a lure, a vehicle of ideological displacement. A step further from this zero-level of violence is taken in Paul Schrader’s and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, in the final outburst of Travis (Robert de Niro) against the pimps who control the young girl he wants to save (Jodie Foster). The implicitly suicidal dimension of this passage à l’acte is crucial: when Travis prepares for his attack, he practices drawing the gun in front of a mirror; in what became the best-known scene in the film, he addresses his own image in the mirror with the aggressive-condescending “You talkin’ to me?” In a textbook illustration of Lacan’s notion of the “mirror stage,” the aggression here is clearly aimed at oneself, at one’s own mirror-image.This suicidal dimension reemerges at the end of the slaughter scene when Travis, heavily wounded and leaning against the wall, mimics with the forefinger of his right hand a gun aimed at his bloodstained forehead and mockingly triggers it, as if saying: “The real aim of my outburst was myself.” The paradox of Travis is that he perceives himself as part of the degenerate dirt of the city life he wants to eradicate, so that—as Brecht put it apropos of revolutionary violence in The Measure Taken—he wants to be the last piece of dirt with whose removal the room will be clean. Far from indicating an imperialist arrogance, such “irrational” outbursts of violence— one of the key topics of American culture and ideology—stand, rather, for an implicit admission of impotence: their very violence, display of destructive power, is to be conceived as the mode of appearance of its very opposite—if anything, they are exemplary cases of the impotent passage à l’acte. As such, these outbursts enable us to discern the hidden obverse of the much-praised American individualism and self-reliance: the secret awareness that we are all helplessly thrown around by forces out of our control. There is a wonderful early short story by Patricia Highsmith, “Button,” about a middle-class New Yorker who lives with his nine-year-old Down’s syndrome son, who babbles meaningless sounds all the time and smiles, saliva running out of his open mouth; late one evening, unable to endure the situation any longer, he decides to take a walk on the lonely Manhattan streets. Here he stumbles upon a destitute homeless beggar, who pleadingly extends his hand toward him; in an act of inexplicable fury, the hero beats the beggar to death and tears a button off his jacket. Afterward, he returns home a changed man, enduring his family nightmare without any traumas, even capable of a kind smile at his handicapped son; he keeps the button in the pocket of his trousers all the time—a remainder that, once at least, he did strike back against his miserable destiny.

Links

CyberThe cyber-capitalist movement has already reappropriated DnG. MarksMarks 06—Reader in Critical Theory @ Nottingham Trent University (John, 2006, Deleuze and the Contemporary World, Edinburgh University Press, “Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics,” rmf)

Finally, there is the issue of the links between cyberspace and advanced capitalism, given that many cyberspace enthusiasts also seem to embrace the free-market ethos of globalised neo-liberal capitalism. The most obvious expression of this cybercapitalism is Wired magazine. The magazine’s executive editor, Kevin Kelly, for example, perceives a direct analogy between the use of cybernetic feedback loops to improve production and efficiency in the post-war steel industry, and the neoliberal theories of Hayek and the Austrian school of economics (Kelly 1994: 121–2). For Kelly, the emerging global network economy is rhizomatic, and should be thought of as a constantly evolving, decentralised system that proliferates in a quasi-biological manner: As networks have permeated our world, the economy has come to resemble an ecology of organisms, interlinked and coevolving, constantly in flux, deeply tangled, ever expanding at its edges. As we know from recent ecological studies, no balance exists in nature; rather, as evolution proceeds, there is perpetual disruption as new species replace old, as natural biomes shift in their

makeup, and as organisms and environments transform each other (Kelly 1998: 108). In this way, then, in recent years, Deleuze and Guattari have found themselves co-opted into this alliance between cyberspace and cutting edge capitalism. In his recent assessment of Deleuze’s work, Organs Without Bodies, Slavoj Zizek goes so far as to claim that it may well be justified to call Deleuze ‘the ideologist of late capitalism’ (Zizek 2004: 184).3 He implies that Deleuze does not fully work through the consequences of the ‘spectral materialism’ that is entailed by the information revolution, biogenetics and quantum physics (Zizek 2004: 25). He goes on to suggest that, particularly in his work with Guattari, Deleuze may in some ways be seen to endorse the Gnostic fantasies of cyberspace that are such an important part of late ‘digital’ capitalism (Zizek

2004: 184–7). In this way, Zizek suggests that there is a ‘pro-capitalist’ aspect, as he puts it, in the work of Deleuze and Guattari themselves (Zizek

2004: 193). There is a close correlation, he claims, between Deleuze’s Spinozist commitment to the impersonal circulation of affects and the affective dynamics of late capitalism (Zizek 2004: 183–4). Others have also argued that Deleuze and Guattari’s work is in some ways in tune with the particular phase of late or advanced capitalism that has coincided with the recent growth of information and computer technologies . Without going so far as to claim that such a tendency is inherent in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Richard

Barbrook has drawn direct parallels between ‘Deleuzoguattarian’ Net enthusiasts and what he terms ‘Californian hi-tech neo-liberalism’ (Barbrook 2001: 173). As far as Zizek is concerned, the ‘proto-capitalist’ aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s work is developed most fully in the recent Swedish bestseller Netocracy, by Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist (2002). Zizek is aware that Bard and Söderqvist claim that

the ‘netocratic’ society that is currently emerging is actually post-capitalist. For them, Deleuze, as a key inheritor of what they call the ‘mobilistic’ tradition, offers ways of grappling this new reality (Bard and Söderqvist 2002: 110–11). This mobilistic, or ‘eternalistic’ mode of thought is the

only one that will help us to think through the consequences of the new ‘netocratic’ society that is replacing capitalism. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism so, they claim, ‘informationalism’ is in the process of replacing capitalism. The Internet has emerged as the definitive model of the new social reality in which information and knowledge finally replace capital . However, for Zizek, there is no critical edge to Bard and Söderqvist’s use of Deleuze and

Guattari: What they are actually claiming is that the netocrats, today’s élite, realize the dream of yesterday’s marginal philosophers and outcast artists (from Spinoza to Nietzsche and Deleuze). In short, and stated even more pointedly, the thought of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, the ultimate philosophers of resistance, of marginal positions crushed by the hegemonic power network, is effectively the ideology of the newly emerging ruling class. (Bard and Söderqvist 2004: 193)

FlowsThe AFF’s understanding of difference through flows makes resistance impossible and disguises our material reality. WillattWillatt 08—University of Essex (Edward, 2008, 11th International Graduate Conference in Philosophy: Philosophy Post-1968, “Thinking Difference through Flows: Deleuze and Guattari on the Immanence of Desire to Society in Anti-Oedipus,” rmf)

We have followed so far Deleuze and Guattari's attempts to think difference through flows but must now consider an objection to this whole approach towards thinking difference. In his book Organs without Bodies Slavoj Žižek makes the case that we cannot think difference through flows if difference is to have any social or political value. In order to attain this, difference must secure the finitude and abstraction of the subject . Žižek sees desiring-production as being an escape from the constitutive social difference that is the real

object of desire. This ultimate difference is symbolic castration. It makes subjects finite and so establishes the problems of finitude as the condition of any political action. He writes critically that '...Deleuze

experienced his collaboration with Guattari as ... a “relief”: the fluidity of his texts cowritten with Guattari, the sense that now, finally, things run smoothly, is effectively a fake relief – it signals that the burden of thinking was successfully avoided.' Difference must constitute a challenge by making the subject finite – allowing politics to arise as challenging and hazardous – but it must also provide the abstraction that enables the subject to rise above their material situation. Deleuze and Guattari's attempt to think difference through flows is escapist for Žižek. He defends Oedipus as the structural way of organising social space or thinking the difference that expresses the constitutive finitude

and abstraction of the political subject. In criticising the picture of desiring-production that we have been sketching , Žižek writes that '... far from tying us down to our bodily reality, “symbolic castration” sustains our very ability to “transcend” this reality and enter the space of immaterial Becoming'. By definition a political subject is faced with the challenge of their own finitude as well as being abstracted from the flows or drives that would otherwise provide distraction or escape from political concerns. Žižek identifies Deleuze and Guattari's notion of matter as the 'polymorphous perversity' of drives. He compares the activity of desiring-

production to market relations in late capitalism, where experimentation with different lifestyles and positions leaves no 'empty space' where the subject can question the order of society. His criticism is that experimentation with difference, being perverse, escapes the traumatic problems of finitude imposed by symbolic castration. How can the subject resist capitalism, he asks, if it is the interceptor of the very flows that are harnessed by capitalist social machines? If everything is relative to flows then for Žižek politics never gets started.