Monday, October 02, 2006
(4:30 AM) | Anonymous:
Deleuze, Torture, and Resisting a Fascist America
There are two things that have recently happened I want to comment on, and hopefully I can articulate why the two are related in my mind. All things considered, it's far too long, but maybe it can give us something to talk about.Jodi Dean has linked to an article that has been floating around concerning the Israeli Army’s use of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. It’s an interesting article and raises some questions that we should all think about and discuss, but there are many ‘anti-Deleuzians’ of Badiouian and Zizekian loyalties who are touting this as some kind of refutation of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. This is all very silly to me, even if we forget that Deleuze and Guattari never made the body without organs a magical machine of emancipation or that transcendent moral categories of good and evil do not correspond in any way to the conceptions of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly warn against such a view (and I’d give you a page number if my copy wasn’t in a box somewhere on a boat or van somewhere) and always relate their work back to a kind of ethics a la Spinoza.
Now, in my view, Jodi is correct to suggest that this challenges our notions that some theoretical works are in themselves emancipatory, and sadly many students in the English world do seem to think this of Deleuze and Guattari. Even more sad is that it appears to be true of the majority of students concerning nearly every Leftist thinker (yes, even Bertrand Russell). Everyone prattles on about this and that as if it is going to save the world, but we all know that a book never saved the world and never will save the world. Not because a book isn’t politically or socially viable, or because a book isn’t a tool, or because a book isn’t a productive act. No, it’s because books are only part of a potentially emancipatory assemblage (forgive my Deleuzo-Guattarian-ism). The Ani DiFranco lyric quoted by Hardt and Negri rings true: Anything can be a weapon if you hold it right. Alternately, anything can be an opiate if you digest it correctly, and that goes for all our intellectual labour as well. Do you think reading Žižek and blogging about the failures of Democracy are anything but an opiate? That they are anything but an opiate for a more privileged class? I could be wrong, but to me they seem to be a very dangerous opiate if abstracted from actual bodily struggle. (Not that blogging about other peoples’ opiates is anymore radical or emancipatory, and in fact it usually manifests itself as a kind of ressentiment.) For all the shit Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri get about their thought from people like Žižek and the mainstream of American political theory one has to give them this credit. They are actually involved in political struggle just as much as they are involved in intellectual labour. They do what many academics fail to do – they act on their stated intellectual beliefs. Granted, their current popularity, at least for the American Hardt, may help protect them in some sense from retribution at the economic level (though Hardt appears to have a history of this kind of engagement even before such economic protection).
Now, why are we to suspect that Žižek cares at all about a philosophy connected to politics? He’s all Lenin this and Stalin that, but when it comes down to it he doesn’t even want to be all that political (we’ve all read or heard interviews about his interests being more philosophical than political) or believe that we need philosophy when facing some catastrophic event. And so there is something sick when during the Birkbeck conference on the ‘Politics of Truth’ he had the whole crowd nodding in agreement about his statement that the ‘post-modern’ Subcommandate Marcos was worse than Stalin because he claims to speak for all the oppressed (which, incidentally, completely misses the point of Marcos’ statement) and refuses to lead a popular front to take State power. If the Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophical project (which may be plugged into political action or may not) is essentially the production of concepts, then the Žižekian project is essentially the production of judgment and, it seems to me, it is a kind of judgment that blocks political action. Why is it that no groups have come behind the thought of Žižek to begin the revolutionary project? That’s not to say that I share the view of more than a few liberals that Žižek shouldn’t be read. That he is making fun of his ‘fans’. That he takes attention away from the ‘real work’ needing to be done (for that ‘real work’ invoked by the more politically active than thou is always a kind of bookkeeping – another opiate when what is needed is political and cultural revolution and good governing). My point is rather banal and obvious – intellectual work, by virtue of being done by a Leftist, is not emancipatory work and, furthermore, I don’t hold that it has to be. (Read Chairman Bob Avakian if you want that stuff.)
Now, I want to relate this to the current acceptance of fascism (and that’s what I believe we know face – a fascist America) through the actual dismantling of the democratic constitution by legalizing torture. Whereas we know that in many ways there was already a de facto disrespect for the most emancipatory and radical parts of that constitution, that did not constitute a fascist state. In the overturning of the inhuman rule of law in favour of what amounts to a dictator (unitary executive) we have accepted fascism. Now many of us who self-identify as Left but have no option other than the Democratic Party for an actual political expression of that identity will want to find reasons why the Democratic Party did not go to their ruin over this; whether that reason be found in a ridiculous fear of losing the filibuster or losing swing voters over the ‘security vote’. The reality is in fact far worse – the highest levels of the Democratic Party are in collusion with this fascism. They are acting on their own desire to both regain power and do so with the ability to torture and detain those suspected of terrorism. The repression of the Left under Clinton was much less severe than it is now, but this is only on account of 9/11 and has nothing to do with the mainline of the Democratic Party having some kind of affinity with the Left. This is why they don’t fight like we want them to – because they are letting the Republican right-wing do all those things they think are necessary, but don’t have the stomach to do openly themselves.
What bothers me more than the Democratic Party’s failure is the failure on the part of the American people to resist. It may be we have now become little Eichmanns, either willingly or through allowing enough distractions to steal our attention, and that others of us have been paralyzed by fear. I don’t see myself as being above this condemnation, as I effectively spent the last year working my ass off to get more of my particular opiate (which I hope to put to some good use – lest we forget that opiate has medicinal uses). I found that I was paralyzed by debt and a certain sense of judgment as well as the normal structures of repression present in an American city like Chicago. All of this blocked any ‘meaningful’ political work being done on my part. It’s partly that I didn’t have enough money to get access to that particular desire and it’s partly that I find myself wondering what to actually do. I’m sure many of those who are still reading have the same question. The fact is that there is a hegemonic dimension to all of this. We call this hegemonic because even if a Cuban-Venezuelan strike force raided Guantanamo to either free those prisoners found to have no evidence of wrong-doing or to send through the channels of the international courts of law those found to have suitable evidence of wrongdoing to merit a trial, they would do so at the citizens of Cuba and Venezuela’s peril. The most powerful nation in the world with the greatest nuclear capacity happens to be the only nation to ever use such a weapon and recently found that its President can do whatever he may please, during times of ‘imminent threat,’ to those he feels may be, in some way, aiding the terrorists. Perhaps because the word is so close to immanence we can say that Bush is a univocal vitalist and thus further condemn Deleuze and those impassioned by him to the flames. In situations like this we are all at a loss for what to do as State-power appears as the only form of logic with which to address this situation and dictates thereby the lack of options.
Now, the blog-style of conceptualizing I’ve undertaken above is not doing anything I can think of to actually help the suffering undergone by those in Guantanamo or their families who, lest we forget, may never even get word of where their husbands, fathers, brothers, or, in some cases, grandfathers are. One could even say that this style of conceptualization never gets out of cliché, even as it desperately wants to break free and over a more naked image of what is to be done or what is actually going on. Now, the work of Deleuze and Guattari actually does open up a few ways of thinking in a different logic that can inform, you know, actually doing something (though there are certainly not the only ones or some oracle of divine Leftist action knowledge). The two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia can be read as differentiating the two different regimes of signs that make up the State and capitalism respectively. (The two regimes are interconnected, but one does not necessarily affect the one through the other, as they are highly complex. Indeed one could say that we need to undertake an ecological study of the two to adequately work within them). Now, realising that State-logic is not our only recourse when we are trying to figure out how to resist, I’m going to suggest that tactics like the ones Christian Peacemaker Teams use represent viable options to undertake regarding resisting and ending torture. That is, though Cuba and Venezuela can’t undertake a rescue mission being entrenched in State-logic, civil society can.
So, let’s all go to Cuba. It seems like the only thing that has a chance of working, but it also seems to be the hardest to pull off. Do you think George Soros would fund an expeditionary force and relocation for everyone involved? Or the Pope? Both of them could, but neither well. Who would die for the sake of a debtor? More over, who would die for the sake of a terrorist? Who wants to break out of cliché to affect a new action spurred forth by a new thought?
