Deleuze & Fascism

Security: War: Aesthetics

Brad Evans, Julian Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136680236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume deploys Deleuzian thinking to re-theorize fascism as a mutable problem in changing orders of power relations dependent on hitherto misunderstood social and political conditions of formation. The book provides a theoretically distinct approach to the problem of fascism and its relations with liberalism and modernity in both historical and contemporary contexts. It serves as a seminal intervention into the debate over the causes and consequences of contemporary wars and global political conflicts as well as functioning as an accessible guide to the theoretical utilities of Deleuzian thought for International Relations (IR) in a manner that is very much lacking in current debates about IR.

Covering a wide array of topics, this volume will provide a set of original contributions focussed in particular upon the contemporary nature of war; the increased priorities afforded to the security imperative; the changing designs of bio-political regimes, fascist aesthetics; nihilistic tendencies and the modernist logic of finitude; the politics of suicide; the specific desires upon which fascism draws and, of course, the recurring pursuit of power.

An important contribution to the field, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, fascism and international relations theory.

1 Desire and ideology in fascism

Todd May

Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desire into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 29)

It is the task of this paper to show that the above quote is exactly half right. Fascism is a matter of desire. However, it is not only that; it is also a matter of ignorance or illusion. In fact, it arises at the point at which desire and ignorance and/or knowledge arise. In order to show this, we will contrast Deleuze and Guattari's thought with that of a contemporary journalist who, to my knowledge, has not been brought into productive discussion with contemporary French thought. In What's the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank argues that it is precisely a matter of ignorance or illusion (and for Frank, specifically, ideology) that is operative in the dominance of conservative thought in America's heartland. It is because the masses have been duped into believing an ideology contrary to their interests that Republicans have come to dominate that part of the country. As with Deleuze and Guattari, this paper will argue that Franks is exactly half right.

In order to place these two halves into a proper whole, we will need to appeal to a picture of desire and illusion that roots them in human practice. It is through a conception of practice that we can recognize that, in a sense, people can, under certain conditions, want fascism. This is true even though people rarely tell themselves that it is fascism that they want. Again, it is through a conception of practice that we can understand how people can be duped into endorsing fascism, even when it is against their interest. The conception of practice to be developed here will have affinities with the thought of Michel Foucault. Although Foucault does not offer a theoretical articulation of this conception, it can be said to be operative particularly in his more genealogical work.

In order to approach these ideas, I will start with a short summary of Deleuze and Guattari's treatment of desire and then of Franks's treatment of illusion. The goal is simply to situate the key elements of these discussions as a backdrop for the positive conception of practice to be developed here. Then I will return to these elements in order to show their proper place in that conception and, one hopes, to show the half-rightedness of each of these treatments. My claim for the alternative conception will not come in the form of an argument. I do not try to show that either Deleuze and Guattari or Franks is half-mistaken. Rather, I seek to put in place a conception of human practice that is compelling enough that the way I situate desire and illusion will also seem compelling. That is to say, in keeping with Deleuze's dictum in Dialogues, rather than arguing at length against the reduction of fascism either to desire or to illusion, I will mostly ‘go on to something else’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 1).

For Deleuze and Guattari, fascism, like much else in human commitment, is not a matter of ignorance or mistaken reflection. This is in keeping particularly with Deleuze's Nietzschean orientation toward human consciousness: that it is secondary or even epiphenomenal. For Deleuze, much of what makes us tick is unconscious. Consciousness comes afterwards. The vast majority of human experience and motivation happens outside our reflective awareness. ‘Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject. We speak of our “self” only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says “me”’ (Deleuze 1994: 75).

This idea finds expression in Anti-Oedipus' central claim that ‘the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation … There is only desire and the social, and nothing else’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 29). We must be careful in understanding this citation. It could appear to be more Rousseauian than it is. If we take Deleuze and Guattari to mean that there is only desire on the one hand and the social on the other, it would be only a short step to thinking that the social is an evil that represses desire. This would align their thought with Rousseau's idea (at least in some of his moods) that organized society represses the natural goodness of human being.

However, this would be to forget the central idea of Anti-Oedipus: that desire is productive. If there is only desire and the social, it is because desire produces the social. Rather than, as with psychoanalytic theory, desire being desire for something, desire directly creates its objects. We can recognize here Deleuze's distinction between the virtual and the actual. The actual is a product of the virtual. The virtual is a field of difference from which all actuality arises. The actual, in turn, emerges from the virtual, while still retaining the virtual within it. In the same way, desire produces the social. Now it may be that the social produced by desire in turn represses or transforms or distorts desire, as the authors argue Oedipus does, but this does not mean that the social is exterior to desire, or that it comes from something or somewhere else. As Deleuze insists throughout his career, there is no transcendence, only immanence. Deleuze and Guattari note in What is Philosophy? of all the illusions of philosophy, ‘First of all there is the illusion of transcendence, which, perhaps, comes before all the others’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 49). To say that there is only desire and the social, then, is to say that there is only desire and what it creates, which includes the social.

On this view, if there is a problem of fascism, it is a problem of desire rather than of illusion or ideology. ‘It is not a question of ideology. There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with preconscious investments, or with what preconscious investments “ought to be.” That is why, when subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests … it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 104). The picture Deleuze and Guattari are trying to overcome here is a traditional Marxist one. On this picture, the reason the masses do not immediately seek their own interests – which would necessarily be revolutionary ones – is that they have been ideologically deceived. They have been convinced that their interests are aligned with, rather than contrary to, the interests of the ruling class. If this is right, the political task would be to educate the masses, to get them to recognize their true interests. Otherwise put, the first task of political struggle would be to overcome the ideological blinders that have prevented the masses from seeing their true interests.

The problem with this picture is, in Deleuze and Guattari's view, that it sees things the wrong way around. It is not that we come to desire fascism rather than revolution because we mistakenly believe that fascism is good for us. Rather, it is because we become invested in fascism that we come to believe in it. Desire as a form of unconscious creation and investment comes first. In fact, from this perspective it does not even matter whether we believe in fascism. We can be entirely cynical and believe in nothing at all. Politics is not a matter of belief; it is a matter of what we desire. To ask why it is that the masses form beliefs that are against their own interests is to ask the wrong question; it is to ask a question at the wrong level. ‘We see the most disadvantaged, the most excluded members of society invest with passion the system that oppresses them, and where they always find an interest in it, since it is here that they search for and measure it. Interest always comes after’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 346).

Even to ask why we desire fascism is to mistake the political project. The goal instead, which is the project of schizoanalysis, is to recognize the character of libidinal investments and then to see what can be done to make those investments more revolutionary. ‘The first positive task consists in discovering in a subject the nature, the formation, or functioning of his desiring-machines, independent of any interpretations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 322). The second task is ‘to reach the investments of unconscious desire of the social field, insofar as they are differentiated from the preconscious investments of interest, and insofar as they are not merely capable of counteracting them, but also of coexisting with them’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 350). Rather than interpreting reality for the masses so they that can come to see what is oppressing them, to recognize the fascism which they have been duped into embracing, schizoanalysis aims to discover the particular investments one makes into the social field and then to counter them with other, more revolutionary, investments.

This, I would argue, is why Anti-Oedipus is written in the way that it is. There has, of course, been much commentary on the style of the book: its energy, its use of curse words, its slash-and-burn treatment of Lacan and others. However, if we treat the style as something exterior to its message, we miss the point of that style. If the political goal were one of convincing people to believe otherwise than they do, then there might be something juvenile about the writing, but that is not the political goal. Rather, it is to get people's desire going in another direction. Anti-Oedipus seeks to realign our desire more than our belief. It seeks to follow its own message that we ask not what something means but how it works. That is why, when Foucault claims in the preface to Anti-Oedipus that it is ‘a book of ethics’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: xiii), he is right on target. It is a book that seeks to get us to live differently, not by convincing us of better ways to live, but by offering desire (as well as philosophy and critical social thought) another way to invest in the social field, which is to say another way to create.

If, for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘the concept of ideology is an execrable concept that hides the real problems’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 344), for Thomas Frank ideology or illusion is precisely the heart of the matter. In What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank seeks to understand the Republican strategy from the Regan years of the 1980s to the Bush years of the early 2000s (the book was published in 2004, prior to the second term of the Bush administration), to win the support particularly of middle America and, for Frank's purposes, of Kansans. What puzzles him, which is not dissimilar to what puzzles Deleuze and Guattari, is how people can be brought to support policies that are directly opposed to their interests. Where Deleuze and Guattari undercut the primacy of the concept interests, however, Franks seeks instead to remain precisely on that terrain. His strategy is to show that by focusing on certain cultural issues, the Republicans have been able to garner support for their economic programs, which is really what motivates them:

The movement's basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern … Over the last three decades they have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the country's return to a nineteenth-century pattern of wealth distribution … The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate.

(Frank 2004: 6)

Frank's critique can be seen as part of Marxist tradition of ideology critique, although he is not, to my knowledge, a Marxist. His view is that by getting people to focus on what have come to be called ‘wedge issues’ – abortion, homosexuality, violence and sex in movies and on television, evolution, etc. – they can be enlisted in support of the Republicans, for whom these issues matter less than transferring wealth to the economic elites. In fact, as Frank points out, there has been very little change on the wedge issues over the years. When Republicans assume office, they rarely give more than lip service to those issues. (Abortion may be a bit of an exception here, although it is still fundamentally available to most women, even if it is more difficult to obtain.) On the other hand, there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich, in accordance with Republican economic policies.

This massive transfer of wealth has been devastating for Kansas. While companies that locate in Kansas receive various economic perks, Kansans find themselves in dire economic circumstances. In Kansas in particular, economic deregulation has led to extraordinary wealth for agribusiness, while leaving most Kansans far worse off economically. ‘Indeed, over two-thirds of Kansas communities lost population between 1980 and 2000, some by as much as 25 percent. I am told that there are entire towns in the western part of the state getting by on Social Security; no one is left there but the aged. There are no doctors, no shoe stores. One town out here even sold its public school on eBay’ (Frank 2004: 60). What Frank describes has not, of course, been limited to Kansas. David Harvey, for instance, who writes more self-consciously in the Marxist tradition, has detailed a global shift of wealth during the course of the neoliberal period (dating roughly from the 1980s to the present). ‘After the implementation of neoliberal policies in the late 1970's, the share of national income of the top 1 per cent of income earners in the US soared, to reach 15 per cent (very close to its pre-Second World War share) by the end of the century … And when we look further afield we see extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power …’ (Harvey 2005: 16–17).

How has this transfer of wealth been able to go unopposed by those who have been its donors? What is the role of cultural wedge issues in blunting this opposition? For Franks, the wedge issues help erect a distinction between two kinds of people, those elites and us regular folks. Some of us regular folks may have money, but we've earned it the old-fashioned way. Those other folks are just lucky, and don't deserve what they have. ‘Class, conservatives insist, is not really about money or birth or even occupation. It is primarily a matter of authenticity … In red land both workers and their bosses are supposed to be united in disgust with those affected college boys at the next table, prattling on about French cheese and villas in Tuscany and the big ideas for running things that they read in books’ (Frank 2004: 113–14).Wedge issues, then, function as ideology. They do not so much cover up the fact that there are disparities of wealth as contextualize and minimize it.

For the Republican strategists, wedge issues don't operate simply by getting one to focus attention on cultural issues while the economic disparities are being created. On the contrary, these disparities are being created openly. In order to be able to do so, Republicans operate by creating and/or reinforcing a particular sense of identity among those in what are called the ‘red’ states. That identity consists in humility as opposed to arrogance, reverence as opposed to atheism, and ‘above all, a red-stater is a regular, down-home working stiff, whereas a blue-stater is always some sort of pretentious paper shuffler’ (Frank 2004: 23). Once this identity is created, wealth can be transferred and people impoverished as long as that transfer is being made to others who are just as ‘red’ as oneself. Moreover, if there is blame to be assigned for the circumstances in which one finds oneself, it belongs not to those who share one's identity but instead to those who do not. As I write these words in May 2010, the Tea Party stands as exemplary of this element of Franks's analysis, blaming Washington, Wall Street and immigrants for the current economic straits of the United States. While the last of these is not an elite ‘blue’ group, it is a population that is said to be favored by that group because it doesn't understand the trouble caused to real people by immigrants, who, after all, are not really part of ‘us.’

We might pause a moment here to consider the relationship between two terms I have invoked together: illusion and ideology. Frank does not make the distinction, although it is perhaps worth marking. Ideology is a matter of beliefs. However, of course, that doesn't distinguish it from science or the study of ethics or anything else with an epistemological character, including illusion. The unique character of ideology is its way of working with beliefs. It works by getting people to develop certain beliefs that will have the effect of making other things happen, things that are the real goal of those instilling the beliefs (or of those who, while not seeking to instill them, still benefit from them). Ideology, then, does not have to be a matter of illusion. One can believe, for instance, that abortion is wrong and also believe, correctly, that liberals support abortion rights, but if one votes out of these beliefs for someone who, while opposing abortion, is more interested in supporting policies that enrich the wealthy, then one is subject to ideology. Opposition to abortion becomes ideological in character.

Often, however, ideology is aligned with illusion. In Frank's analysis, the creation of ‘red state’ and ‘blue state’ identities in order to support conservative policies involves not only correct beliefs but illusory ones as well. For instance, one belief underlying support for Republican policies is that a free market will make life better for ‘down-home working stiffs.’ Of course, it has not. This is an illusion. As we have seen, it is a persistent illusion, since it remains strong in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

Moreover, there can be something illusory in the ideological use of abortion as well. If the Republican strategy of wedge issues uses abortion and identity in order to press an economic agenda, and if, as Frank seems to imply, their real concern is not at all with the former but only with the latter, then those who vote Republican are under the illusion that those they vote for will press their causes in a serious way. As we have noted, once in office it is the economic rather than the social issues that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Interventions
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: fascism in all its forms
• 1 Desire and ideology in fascism
• 2 Anti-fascist aesthetics
• 3 Fascism and the bio-political
• 4 Movement and human logistics: pre-emption, technology and fascism
• 5 A people of seers: the political aesthetics of post-war cinema revisited
• 6 Waltzing the limit
• 7 Politics on the line
• 8 Fascist lines of the tokkōtai
• 9 Fascism, France and film
• Index