SDV Duras is an engineer and philosopher who after spending the 1970s as a revolutionary, partially retired during the 1980s and underwent a new education and training in phlosophy and media. Beginning to become cautiously active again in the last dozen or so years. The neoliberal counter revolution was well under way, the appropriation of the radical specificity of race, gender, consumerist and other identity based politics was noticeably central to the neoliberal turn. By the late 1980s it was clear that an academic career was not a sensible option, instead he became an engineer (analysis, design and code). He suppose it’s marginally interesting that he is the person that the neoliberal counter-revolution was designed for, which is why the socialism, communism and the philosophy derived in part from the exemplary lines of thought Marx and Deleuze have been essential to constrain and humanize my behaviour throughout the neoliberal period.
C. Derick Varn: Deleuze as well as Deleuze and Guattari have benefited from increased usage in the last two decades; however, it seems like Deleuze may be the one of the philosophers that is often attacked on whatever superficial grounds and even defended and applied on superficial grounds. What are the problems you have seen in the way Deleuze is applied in the academy right now?
SDV Duras: As Deleuze pointed out politics, like life, is an experimental activity. However the loss and absence we can see with Deleuze is that whilst he was alive he never succeeded in breaking out of the confines of the academy. Even now it’s not clear that his texts have escaped from the academy. As such he never succeeded in applying the techniques of his work to life as it is lived. So that Deleuze never managed to work towards criticizing the ordinary objects of life, the literature of his time, cinema, television, the fleeting and imaginary concerns of the public and private spheres. In a sense we know that Deleuze wanted to take sides – and yet there is a sense in which he could not as there is always an ambivalence in the engagement. As Benjamin writes in One-Way Street, “He who cannot take sides should keep silent.”
By the mid-70s translations of Deleuze and Guattari work began to appear, both from the USA and more local translations. The adoption of Nietzsche as a counter-cultural figure took place during this period, Nietzsche was unconvincingly presented as the founding father of the counter-culture. Shortly after this in 1978 the English translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was published, copies arriving in the UK when it was remaindered in 1979. Arguably a more significant moment was the publication of Rhizome and the accompanying academic dossier on their work in I&C no 8 published in 1981. What is important about this dossier is that it marks the moment when the English speaking academy began to take ownership of Deleuze and Guattari. In retrospect the publication appears at the moment when the themes began to be discussed and defined which were to remain central to the way the work was appropriated, even now, thirty years later. With the not insignificant difference that the writers in I&C assumed, as we all did, that the work was on the side of human emancipation. It took only a few years before the readings implicit in the I&C would be presented as the correct and true readings of the texts. To put it in another way the words, the meanings tentatively established in the 1980s and made concrete in the 1990s have been maintained as the orthodox readings ever since. Mistakenly thinking that the work was not appropriable by the right, by those who are necessarily against human emancipation, who are knowingly or unknowingly for hierarchy and control.
The right wing appropriation of the work began to emerge in the 1990s. And yet we can see how this tendency was evident in the earlier Nietzschean counter-cultural appropriation. The possibility certainly existed in the texts but we misunderstood how it might be used and what the right might actually look like. The conservative and liberal meanings of this interpretation of the texts have gradually become more obvious. Careers began to be established, a school of Deleuzeian studies developed and over the last twenty years the Deleuze information industry with its academic support network was introduced. The academy established a way of reading the Deleuze and Guattari texts which directly enabled the right to appropriate and take ownership of the aspects it required to maintain the dominance of their line of thought. The first secondary journals and books dedicated to Deleuze and Guattari begin to appear in the 1980s, which developed into a stream in the 90s and in the 21st Century a flood. During this period the right wing appropriation and the conservative tendencies in the academy were reinforced exactly as the dominant neoliberal ideology required. Even now as new intellectual fashions develop and Neoliberalism has failed this tendency continues.
Negri’s worry about the institutionalization of Deleuzian social and political philosophy is worth remembering here, which is to say that the difficulties of molecular revolutions have with creating links between consequences. Which is to say the difficultly of actually taking power. As Guattari said… “… will these micro-revolutions…be put away to restricted sphere of the social sphere ? Or will they be articulated in new social segmentations that won’t imply the restitution of hierarchy and segregation ? In short will all these new micro-revolutions set up a new revolution ? Will they be capable of assuming not just local problems, but the management of big economic sets?” As we know so far at least there has been no sign of a new revolutions being enabled by this and as these incoherent sentences of Guattari suggest the danger of new-fascisms, new hierarchies and segregations should concern us.
CDV: Many Anti-Oedipus’s notions of territorialisation, deterritorialisation, and reterritorialisation under capitalism have obvious correlates in identity politics. Do you think this is strength in way to understand the way identity functions as a means of territorialisation which corresponds to the strategic essentialism, and then expansion of the notion of the pime identity (deterritorialisation corresponding to de-essentialization) and problematic reterritorialised (separatism, chauvenism, etc)? What would be the function of identity politics in this context?
SDV: The retreat which the specific intellectual and identity politics represents was recognized at the beginning of the neoliberal period with the argument from some feminists that a vote for Thatcher was a vote for women. As the Thatcher case demonstrates questions of identity, territorialization, ecology and the minor always have an explicit danger of a reactionary turn, because there is no central engagement in human emancipation. Whether this is essentialist or anti-essentialist depends entirely on the relationship to the universal of human emancipation and the relationship to power. For such a politics to have any usefulness it must maintain an explicit reference towards the universal of human emancipation and construct a politics that is not ‘afraid of power’. What Thatcher demonstrates is that all such politics can entail a becoming-fascist a becoming-reactionary… Who after all has been concerned by the eco-fascism(s) that we have all come across.
CDV: What do you think of Ian Buchanan’s notion that the form of the Deleuze and Guattari’s thought is a formal dialectic, but one that is divorced from Hegelianism?
SDV: It’s not a particularly interesting and useful rereading, I think that in themselves Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari are anti-dialecticians. Not merely against Hegel but against the dialectic itself. It is rather up to us to reintroduce the important Hegalian-Marxist moment back into what is a Spinozist-Marxist line of thought. Aline of thought wants to be just as much post-Hegelian as they want it to be post-Kantian.
However in doing so whilst Deleuze can address the Althussarian moment in Difference and Repetition he cannot begin to take into account the key radical question that Guy Debord asked in the mid 60s – “All the theoretical strands of the revolutionary workers movement stem from critical confrontation with Hegelian thought” – In the present crisis there is still no evidence that a non-Hegelian revolutionary or radical thought will provide an emancipatory moment for humanity.
To often the careerist secondary readers of Deleuze and Guattari maintain a liberalism, in the European sense of the term, as required by the academy.
CDV: What key concepts in Deleuze do you find useful to lived, embodies, everyday activism?
SDV: This is genuinely difficult question, I think that this rests on the politicisation of everything. Which extends beyond the personal is political, into the everyday and beyond science. So then, not just the politicisation of philosophy but the recognition and acceptance that ‘everything is political’. This concept is founded on the way that Marx directed philosophy and everyday life towards the political. And towards the way that because everything is political there are no apolitical domains and fields. For us it is not just in the everyday but also within philosophy that there is no separation of truth from falsity, but instead there is the necessity to analyse, question and work to change the material conditions, to challenge the everyday order in the attempt to construct a new world. This describes in a few sentences the heart of the left wing version of Deleuze, which is the one Badiou references as Democratic Materialist, rather than the right wing variation that Zizek references, it is this one that exists most obviously in Difference and Repetition and in Nietzsche and Philosophy– these are political texts which show the extent to which Deleuze is beholden to Marx and Marxism. A relationship which is made more explicit in the joint project with Guattari.
To be precise then a more political reading of Deleuze is possible as this suggests, but it requires that we accept and work with the extent to which he is a Marxist. Which requires that we do not merely read the Marx from Deleuze’s public sympathy with the Italian Marx of the Autonomia line of thought, but equally understand the readings possible from the other Marxisms…
CDV: What have you have you seen in Deleuze that is easily appropriated by the right?
SDV: Examples are easy with this question – though see below for some enhancements to this response
To begin with see the work of Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, who in his use of Deleuze ‘inverse geometry’, which he explained as ‘the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions’. This is not the first use of Deleuze and Guattari in military work – for that see Manual DeLanda ‘War in the age of Intelligent Machines’ a book I once discussed with an American Colonel whilst flying into Washington in the 90s. Equally critically see the pro-capitalist aspect of Deleuze and Guatari developed by Bard and Soderqvist in Netocracy the quintessential appropriation for a form of network capitalism that creates a horrifying class antagonism between netocrats and consumers. In all these cases the uses made are possible because their work can be considered as being the ideology of a newly emerging ruling class, or to put it another way we have to prevent the appropriation of the work by the emergent class by imposing a universal of human emancipation on the work. It does not exist in the work itself….
CDV: What do you make the figure of Nietzsche in Deleuze’s work? Is Nietzsche’s presence there a problematic point or a liberating poiny or something else entirely?
SDV: This inevitably leads towards an understanding of Deleuze’s work which asks whether a Marxism founded on Spinoza and Nietzsche and written against the dialectic is feasible. To understand Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche it is crucial to recognize the status and use made of Marx, especially in the Nietzsche book and in Difference and Repetition. Deleuze’s strong readings of Spinoza and Nietzsche are founded on a Marxist reinterpretation. A central aspect of Deleuze’s practice is to establish and renew a critical position by respecifying what the philosopher is, through making the philosophers problem explicit and then reproducing the system the philosopher maintains. The critical thing is to recognize that Deleuze’s philosophical practice always works with strong readings of other figures, texts really, Nietzsche, Kant, Leibnitz, Spinoza and so on. The misreading of Nietzsche is particularly influential but in fact Nietzsche remains the same dubious reactionary figure that he always has been. The reactionary heart of Nietzsche is eradicated by the use of Marx. To the extent that we might argue that a new problem emerges at this point, one founded not on a phantasy of a Nietzschean and Spinozist form of Marxism but rather on what the precise relations are with the other forms of Marxist and non-Marxist radical thought.. And then to consider what happens when people move from Deleuze back to Nietzsche ?
CDV: Working in the sciences, do you think motivates the rejection of Deleuze’s work in the sciences?
SDV: There is no acceptable philosophy of science or engineering in Deleuze’s work. He co-opts and produces a series of strong readings but as with the appropriation of Nietzsche we are dealing with readings which cannot be utilized without a recognition of the specificity of the reading. The false difference between Minor Science and Royal Science is the classic representation of the core of the problem science represents and explains why a philosophy of science founded on the work hasn’t developed. Minor science is science as employed by artisans, engineers and is operated by problematics, (ambulant, itinerant, nomad science) which is posed as oppositional, different from Royal science, state science. They argue that minor science works by pushing systems into intensive states in order to follow traits in material to reveal their virtual structures or multiplicities. The examples supplied in ATP are hydrodynamics, metallurgy, masonry. Minor science works by focusing on on material and forces rather than matter form structures of hylomorphism. Royal and State science, also referenced as major science is founded on a critique of the positivist interpretation of classical mechanics. It functions by extracting constants from variables of extensive properties, and the establishment of laws, standard laws and phenomenological ones. Except scientists and engineers are not positivists and haven’t been for many decades, probably they never were…In a sense then the minor and major science difference here avoids the actual issue of state science which is touched on in ATP… A moment that has passed… Which is to say that where they imply an understanding of Georges Dumezil and his definitive analysis of Indo-European mythology, specifically of political sovereignty which has two poles, the king and the jurist. For whilst I accept the Deleuzian proposition that says that science, state and in fact minor science has supplanted religion as the juridicial pole, as the pole of legitimation, and whilst the king even in our liberal parliamentary democracies has remained fundamentally unchanged as the despotic pole, as power. Except that whilst clearly the structure has remained unchanged that the media, the spectacle itself has supplanted both science and religion to become the jurist-media, the acknowledged legislator, the creator of pacts which the ‘king’ is beholden to… the jurist-media, the jurist-spectacle… So that where science as they imply as the juridicial pole was never simply state science, figures such as Newton, Galileo and Einstein obviously but really minor science as well….
In other words the model is explicitly flawed… and the flaw needs naming.
CDV: Do you think Debord complements Deleuze in your understanding of the spectacle?
SDV: Yes, nothing in Deleuze’s work has the clarity of insight that is available as a consequence of the work of Guy Debord and his successors. To briefly consider two lines of thought of current concern; what Hegelian-Marxists like Guy Debord force us to do is address the long term nature of the ongoing crises of capitalism, the almost 100 year old solution to an earlier crisis of capitalism that is the spectacle, that is mass-consumption. Perhaps given out concerns here though equally critical is the insistence that ‘representation’ is important.
What is offered is a focus on everyday life, on life as it is actually lived which the more traditionally focused philosophical work of Deleuze cannot address. The hidden question which Debord raises, which has not yet been properly addressed by Deleuzian thought is whether a radical left politics, can ever be constructed without addressing and accepting some aspects of our Hegelian-Marxist past. For what if Debord is correct when he says that the ‘…revolutionary workers movement stems from a critical confrontation with Hegelian thought…’ This question asked in the mid 1960s was never addressed…
CDV: Do you find accelerationists readings of Deleuze to be dangerous to radical political praxis?
SDV: Do I need to say that accelerationism has the strong smell of Italian Futurism about it ? A futurism which was really addressing and resurrecting a nasty imperial past.
Accelerationist readings are particularly dangerous because they always produce a potentially reactionary appropriation of the work. Not so much as a turn towards a worshipped future singularity, but rather because they constitute a medieval turn towards a seemingly endless aristocratic past and future. Founded not on the analysis and anticipation of progress but rather of a series of masked gestures towards the past. Accelerating ever faster towards the medieval eventually with a new Tudor future, with new unbermensch’s reminiscent of King Henry composing music and art…. There is nothing in an accelerationist co-option of Deleuze that does not end up in a glorious monarchy and perhaps worse in a love of a future Oriental Despotism.
CDV: Anything you’d like to say in closing?
SDV: In the current political and economic crisis it seems vaguely foolish to assume that a specific philosophical and political position is strategically correct. Rather we should accept that in world where everything is political notions of philosophical correctness have less meaning than they used to. Instead we live with the necessity of accepting that everyday life and the political are experimental activities with a requirement that strategy and tactics are lived with, along with the need for a modicum of solidarity. All of which is impossible given the naive tendency towards believing philosophical discourse is related to truth, which as everything is political cannot be considered correct. Curiously Henri Lefebvre argued once that everyday life is non-philosophical and that Marxism (as a philosophy and science(smiles)) should construct a philosophy/science of everyday life, of lived experience and yet the limit of this is that what he is referencing is life after 1929 and the growing dominance of mass-consumption, an affluent society which today is in the process of changing quite dramatically. Yet surely this philosophy/science could perhaps protect us from the study of proletarianized academics working for the furtherance of the control society… because …
…Lived experience has always contained a distanciation, has always been emptied by representation(s). I think it was Benjamin who first noticed people standing with cameras in front of paintings trying to preserve an experience they cannot imagine or have. What this means is that in the integrated spectacle we live within, both representation in general and in the specific forms already referred to, are pure forms of separation. The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes image (Debord) “…when the real world has been transformed into an image and images become real, the practical power of humans is separated from itself and presented as a world unto itself…” It is this which has become the end goal, the meaning of our network society, the manipulation and control of perception, memory and consequently action in our disparate communities. Humanity separated from their commons, their language, their data, their thinking itself. This is the final expropriation, which empties the world of meaning, tradition, beliefs, contents, from the commons in their entirety. In it’s latest neoliberal incarnation it is the negative side of the post-modern understanding that culture is a resource rather than something which owns and creates the human subject. What happens to this now that the neoliberal phase is over is the source and cause of these words.
The responses to these developments have been particularly interesting. We live in a world cursed by the growth in hideous absolutisms. All of which generate rational and even sometimes sensibly angry responses, the violence of geopolitics; the life-destroying dogmatism of Islam, reactionary Christianity and religions in general; the destroyed financial markets with the most extraordinary levels of incompetence and what appear to be naive manipulations which have undermined the social and political economy and condemned material producers to starvation, ever growing slum cities and political administrations that are not capable of engaging in democratic debate and instead impose decisions along the lines defined by the network society, capitalism.
This list of absolutes is no surprise in a sense its inevitable and could be extended quite easily. Will these absolutisms begin to end as the crisis of neoliberalism begins to resolved itself ? What will post-neoliberalism look like ? What is the relationship between them and the integrated spectacle ? What is the relationship between these despotisms and the control society ? Sadly I don’t think we can avoid post-neoliberalism, the left has been so weakened by the neoliberal period that it needs this crisis to merely reestablish itself in some form or another.
For the spectacle has generated these absolutisms especially those that believe they are rejecting it…. In our world the necessity of addressing the integrated spectacle is crucial if we are to make any social and political progress in the next few decades. In a world where all information is virtually image, the information and its still expanding and translucent nature necessitates a belief in a total consciousness. This totality is supported by the technological developments that enable the integrated spectacle to exist, that have supported the globalisation of capitalism, so that the false imaginative consciousness, for that’s what it is, can no longer recognize what is possible, let alone impossible or even nothingness. The integrated spectacle reified and objectified (‘objects all the way down’) can only work towards its extension, the commodification of everything. In this sense then the integrated spectacle and the control society are one and the same thing. Two concepts which are differently named because they emerge from an unnecessary and irrelevant difference. But the control society evades the necessity to address the spectacle, always addressing its organic constituency rather than the world we actually exist in.
Symptomatic Commentary 