Desire is the condition of subjectivity under capitalism

To start with: flows. Wilber asserts that it’s all about holons (which I call coherences, following Ziporyn); I think it’s about flows. This is a debt to Deleuze and Guattari, of course. Incidentally, this discussion is wholly Deleuzian, mostly owing to Anti-Oedipus and an essay called “Balance Sheet Program for Desiring Machines,” which you can find if you look for it.

Flows then. Flows of capital, flows of energy, flows of information, flows of goods and materials and such. That is an economy. Connected to this, though, is a flow of another kind. Deleuze and Guattari would say that the unconscious of this explicit activity is the flow of desire, which is understood as an energy that flows a lot like the energia Stephen Greenblatt describes in Shakespearean Negotiations. I’m not so comfortable with the “unconscious” as a way of understanding this, but I’ll let it lie for now. Desire is the condition of subjectivity under capitalism. Who are you? You are what you desire. It’s more complicated than it looks, actually, because desire is regulated.

The economy, the political and economic structures of a given social group (the world, for example), is that which regulates desire. How? Machines, of course. The machines of the body regulate its flows (shit, piss, milk, menses, jism…); the machines of the body politic regulate subjectivity. They machine it in two senses of the word, manufacturing and shaping.This is why Deleuze and Guattari state that the way to begin a proper analysis of a given subject is with the desiring machines that subject is plugged into.

Watch what happens when my dad is listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio, becomes completely absorbed in it, gets off on it; watch a megachurch pulse and writhe at the infomercial Christianity they’re enjoying; think of sporting events, or theater, or the workplace, or family. If you unplug someone from one desiring machine, what happens? Their subjectivity will simply find another flow from another source to fill the void (this insight courtesy of G.I. Gurdjieff’s concept of the buffer and multiple personalities, which deserves analysis right beside Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of schizophrenia).

Think of the media now, a cluster of very precisely determined desiring machines. The subjects watching this shit know what they want. They want the Echo Chamber. One out of every four Americans eligible to vote in 2004 literally got up and affirmed in a rather masochistic fashion if you ask me to be fed this shit again, voting for Glory Bush and Cheney.

I’ll risk a hyperbolic example. This is from Nineteen Eighty-Four:

“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstacy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies” (15-16).

This goes back to my point about putting Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky on the bullshit machine: all you do is give them a Goldstein, a straw man to point at.

Notice that Orwell gets the relationship between desiring-production and subjectification (in an Althusserian sense more or less) just about as precisely as possible?

Now, what regulates these things? The regime. This poses two problems for someone who wants to change the system of the media. The first is to find a way to install a new regime. That means revolution, the institution of a truly democratic (read: radical democratic) social order. That’s the first revolution, actually, because the second is the one that cannot be televised, which is to monkeywrench your subjectivity in such a way that you desire differently. That is: find a way to desire that which capitalism wants you not to desire, and vice versa. This is why I’m calling for what I’m labeling a critical integral theory, because it’s a critical and integral task.

I played fast and loose with it, but there you have it in outline. I hope that answers your question, Kent. Monday, January 08, 2007 posted by DGA at 4:02 PM 1 comments For The Turnstiles Daniel Gustav Anderson on Critical Theory and Integral Theory