Indians may be under the impression that only illiterate Bengalis gas on about Deleuze. This is not the case. Consider the following-
Living in Smooth Space: Deleuze, Postcolonialism and the Subaltern Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey
Any attempt to situate Deleuze in relation to the postcolonial,
is silly. The dude was pretending to be smart. If darkies could understand what he was getting at, he would have failed.
and in particular to postcolonial theory, will inevitably involve a reckoning with Gayatri Spivak’s well‐known critique of Deleuze (and Foucault) in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’
There was no critique. Spivak pointed out that they had dicks- White dicks- and thus were failing to acknowledge their own complicity in the catachresis of the menstruation of my great Aunty who hanged herself while on the rag.
(1988).¹ Spivak is, of course, an exemplary figure as far as the development of postcolonial theory is concerned.
Because she pointed out that people without dicks were utterly shit.
Her brutal dissection of the interview between Deleuze and Foucault, ‘The Intellectuals and Power’, remains an emblematic encounter between the claims of a certain wing of ‘French theory’ – particularly the Nietzschean inflected variant of it ‐ and a nascent postcolonial critique which Spivak has been so instrumental in establishing.
Did you know Nietzsche had a dick? Dicks cause RAPE! Ban them immediately.
Here, famously, Spivak demolishes the pretensions of Deleuze and Foucault to offer an escape from the universalising ambitions of post‐Enlightenment thought, demonstrating how their admonition to give up representing the oppressed ends up enacting the very same logic of subordination to the Western ‘global‐local’ they claimed to confront in their own work.
Sadly, Spivak and Co, didn't ignore those two dickheads. They wrote even stupider shite not to compete with them but to make out that they mattered to anybody.
Deleuze and Foucault are revealed as post‐Kantian avatars preparing to subordinate otherness to the claims of cosmopolitical reasoning, and the subaltern periphery to the globalising empire of liberal‐capitalism.
But only people who quote those nutters are subordinated to them. Post colonial theory means the sorts of theories the rulers of countries which used to be colonies have. That means the sort of theory Mamta or Mayawati, not Spivak, have.
Spivak has not to our knowledge disavowed her analysis of Deleuze, which implies that the latter’s work and approach remains in some important sense a valid subject of the critiques she develops in the piece; that what Deleuze offers is ‘Eurocentric’, teleological, totalising, and so forth.
He had a dick- a white dick. That makes him almost as bad as that Dalit dude who tried to tear her a new one on the grounds that her ancestor had been a pal of Vidyasagar. Her reply is that firstly Haitians pronounce Du Bois in the English manner and secondly her ancestor was the cook of the pal of Vidyasagar and was paid a little money to marry a widow. Also, I don't got a dick! I'm way more abject than anybody with a dick- even a real small dick.
It is clear that unless the claims advanced by Spivak are examined on their own terms, there will continue to be a significant barrier to the reception of Deleuze ‐ and indeed Deleuze and Guattari ‐ as ‘postcolonial’ thinkers.
Nonsense! There are Indian academics like Skaria who ignore Spivak and gas on about the 'molar' or 'minor' and other such Deleuzian diarrhea.
This is notwithstanding the evident influence their work has had on contemporary theorists operating within the postcolonial frame, such as Arjun Appadurai,
now an American
Achille Mbembe,
who moved to South Africa
and Uday Singh Mehta.
also American. It appears post-colonial thinkers prefer to do their thinking in places with plenty of Whites.
Perhaps because Deleuze and Guattari have also influenced strongly modernist neo‐Marxist thinkers such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
but they have dicks! Dicks cause RAPE!
there appears to be a residual hostility towards the idea that Deleuze and Guattari are quite properly postcolonial thinkers, which we would argue they are.
Coz they were actually darkies. Deleuze's real name was Deshawn. Guattari was a Sardarni from Ludhiana.
Accordingly, we think that there is a need for a reckoning with Spivak’s piece as a ground clearing exercise.
First chop off your dicks. Also, become bleck.
The thrust of this chapter is thus to show that Spivak’s claims concerning the nature of Deleuze’s work are mistaken.
Sadly, Spivak is right to say that Deleuze was White and had a dick. He didn't even pretend to be an albino lady from Tamil Nadu.
We argue that her critique is based on a somewhat cursory examination of Deleuze’s oeuvre, especially the co‐authored work with Guattari, which is replete with analyses of non‐Western, indigenous and subaltern practices and discourses.
But those two nutters rely on Western 'scholars' of startling stupidity.
Getting beyond Spivak’s early analysis is crucial for assessing the usefulness of Deleuze’ and Guattari’s work for the kinds of critical intervention which postcolonial theory seeks to develop.
That 'critical intervention' consists of saying Whitey be debil. Kindly vote for Soniaji due to Modi is Hitler.
Clearing the theoretical horizon in this way allows for a much needed rapprochement between a Spivakian inflected critique of occidental thought
i.e. Whitey be debil. Did you know Jane Austen was White? Why are poor Bengali Professors of Literature being forced to read her shite?
‐ which is the very locus of postcolonial theory at one level‐ and Deleuze’ and Guattari’s approach, which stresses the possibility of advancing an outside, not only of Eurocentric ways of thinking, but also of Eurocentric ‘statism’.
Those nutters didn't get that folk who don't have a State soon get conquered and enslaved or else are ethnically cleansed. This happened to Europeans- e.g. the Sami- just as much as it happened to Tasmanian aborigines.
Such an exercise is, we think, a necessary prelude to the development of a properly postcolonial politics
one where the Indian state disappears so its territory can be taken over by the Caliphate.
to complement the impact of theorisations that have hitherto been largely confined to the world of theory itself. Spivak’s critique of Deleuze can be broken down into five distinct claims, which we explore one at a time. The first of these is that Deleuze and Foucault covertly reintroduce the transcendent European subject by making their own position ‘transparent’ and by means of overly general conceptions of the subject of power and the subject of oppression.
Since the 'transcendental subject' is merely a subject capable of experiencing things, it follows that every person with at least a minimal level of volition is complicit in precisely the same thing. One may as well say 'Spivak's critique of Deleuze is based on the fact that he isn't a picture of a cat'.
The second is that they lack a theory of ideology and, consequently, a theory of interest.
Nobody with 'theory of mind' lacks a 'theory of interest'. The cat understands that you want to stroke it and will feed it if it purrs and snuggles close to you.
The third is that they foreclose the need for counter‐hegemonic ideological production and dialogue with the other, by assuming the other can speak for itself.
If the other can't speak, you can't have a dialogue with them. Assuming a guy who keeps telling you to fuck the fuck off can speak does not foreclose, it opens up, the possibility of dialogue with him more particularly if you offer him money.
The fourth is that their points of reference, the problems they seek to solve and the texts they refer to are entirely caught within a self‐contained West or Europe.
Because they were European and were writing for fellow Europeans. Why the fuck does Macron not make his speeches in Swahili?
The fifth is that their refusal of constitutive contradiction reintroduces an undivided subject and is essentialist.
i.e. their refusal to chop themselves in two was very naughty.
In sum, Deleuze is guilty of erecting a ‘global‐local’ in which a distinct form of subjectivity and logic of being in the world is rendered invisible or ‘unmarked’, whilst other terms are ‘marked’ as local or subordinate to them.
How could he be guilty of erecting something which has always existed? It is a fact that the earth is subordinated to the Sun's gravity. All complex life depends on Sun-light. When the Sun goes super-nova, all life in the Solar System will perish.
The ‘transparent’ subject Spivak’s principal claim in Can the Subaltern Speak? concerns the ‘transparency’ of the subject.
What is transparent to the Hindu reader is that Spivak's great-aunt hanged herself while on the rag as a reproof to her Dad for not having married her off. The menstrual blood of an unmarried daughter pollutes the pinda offering to the ancestors.
In her view, Deleuze ‘restores[s] the category of the sovereign subject’ (278), by which she means that in the manner of classical Western philosophy, he deploys an essentialised subject of oppression, which acts with respect to the object of a singular emancipatory project.
Deleuze couldn't restore shit. He was too stupid.
The task of the intellectual is to allow this subject to speak, in turn making it impossible to engage with those others who do not resemble or sound like this oppressed figure.
In which case, Spivak has signally failed. Anybody at all can upload a Youtube video of a poor woman. They can add subtitles and use Social Media to ensure the thing goes viral. Professors of shite subjects are not needed.
From this standpoint the unmarked intellectual claims to speak truth,
even if they are babbling nonsense
revealing to the reader ‘the surreptitious subject of power and desire marked by the transparency of the intellectual’ (280).
The intellectual pretends to be smart. But smart people gain power and wealth or otherwise change the world.
Deleuze is thus a ‘a dangerous … first world intellectual masquerading as the absent non‐representor who lets the oppressed speak for themselves’ (292),
he was masquerading as a guy who understood Math and Capitalism and Schizophrenia and other such stuff which genuinely smart peeps understood. It is Spivak who claims to speak for darkies who lack dicks.
in whose work ‘a postrepresentationalist vocabulary hides an essentialist agenda’. (285)
Why hide it? Either these two nutters were speaking of stuff which was true in all possible worlds or else they were merely pointing to some contingent or ideographic fact about their own milieu. Incidentally, Spivak claims to be a 'Europeanist'. This means there must be an European essence.
In short, the claim that subaltern subjects are able to represent themselves merely disguises a form of ‘substitutionism’ in which the intellectual elides difference in the name of a universal subject of oppression.
If there is no 'universal subject of oppression', then there is no criteria of demarcation by which one can say x is oppressed or y is not oppressed. Morishima's fundamental theorem of Marxism is an example of a universal criteria- viz. the existence of profit means oppression exists. As I have shown, the existence of dicks too implies the existence of oppression.
This in turn implies Deleuze is indifferent to difference; he is oblivious to the complex forms of differentiation that cannot be encompassed within Western notions of oppression or domination.
because he had a dick- a White dick. That's totes triggering for me.
Given that many sympathisers with Deleuze feel these concerns lie at the heart of the Deleuzian enterprise, the accusation is damaging to say the least.
In other words, the suspicion that Deleuze might actually have been a philosopher- not a lunatic- is highly damaging to say the least.
But does it stand up? Spivak attempts, in Lacanian fashion, to discern a ‘subject of desire’ in Deleuze.
He wanted people to think he was smart.
However Deleuze’s view is not only that desire can be differentiated from subjectivity,
because you can subjectively free yourself of a particular desire. I no longer want to marry Mary Poppins.
but also that desire alone does not produce a unified subject.
Because lots of people share my desire to see Rahul quit politics.
Desire for Deleuze is not an attribute of a desiring subject but is a matter of flows and becomings which traverse the entire social, and indeed, material or ecological field.
Nothing wrong in that. Deleuze followed Gabriel Tarde in that respect. There is a mimetic component to desire. Girard made a good career out of this insight.
Hence, desire is not something ‘possessed’ by the sovereign subject but something inter‐, sub‐ and extra‐subjective.
so is money or pictures of cats. That's why they can be possessed.
The subject, where it exists, is a product of certain forms of desire, but only one of the possible outcomes of what is termed ‘desiring‐production’. It arises from a certain kind of ‘molar’, ‘majoritarian’ or ‘reactive’ construction of desire which produces self‐other boundaries and identities.
These are arbitrary stipulations but can have a concrete model. But they aren't informative. They are not attached to a useful structural causal model. They can't affect outcomes. But that is why armchair philosophy of all types is useless when it isn't funny.
But it arises only from this specific configuration of desire, it is a product (not producer) of desire,
only by arbitrary stipulation. Similarly one could say 'the cat does not miaow. The miaow produces the cat as a miaowing subject'. But this is not informative. It is silly.
and its genesis is in the trapping or capture of desire and not in the kind of affirmative, free‐flowing desire Deleuze and Guattari seek.
conga lines of buggery snaking through the streets of Paris
As Deleuze and Guattari explain in their Anti‐Oedipus (which Spivak largely ignores), desiring‐machines are always molecular, engaged in their own assembly, and their function and formation are indiscernible from one another (1983: 1‐ 9).
Only to cretins. Most of us understand well enough that a pretty girl has no desire to talk to us at a cocktail party. That's why we end up in the kitchen talking to fucking software engineers who think Dungeons & Dragons is still cool.
On the other hand, molar machines
e.g S&M dungeons or chatgroups on the Internet for those who want to find a guy to castrate them
are structurally unified: each appears as a single object or subject, and they have limited and exclusive connections and exclusions. Molar aggregates are products of paranoiac desire, engineered into existence by pitting ‘packs’ and ‘masses’ against one another (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 286‐7, 279).
unless the police shut them down and arrest all concerned.
The molecular is taken as primary, always existing as a vibrant multitude
who are busy castrating each other
beneath any molar formation. Hence, beneath limiting schemas and couples there are bundles of networks and radiations in all directions; ‘[a]n entire multiplicity rumbles under the sameness of the Idea’ (Deleuze 1994: 51,274).
Come to my lectures and though you will be bored out of your skull still you may meet some helpful person who will chop your dick off. Foucault, of course, would insist that the Pope, wearing a gimp suit, and the Sun King should stand by laughing maniacally.
Deleuze and Guattari thus reject dominant ‘humanist’ models of subjectivity focused on the integrity and unity of a single self,
i.e. a regime where the police arrest dudes who chop other dudes' dicks off
instead positing what Brian Massumi has termed the ‘dividual’, the divided and divisible subject of desire (Massumi 1993).
Sadly, the subject of desire has already left the party with one of those software engineers. Oh well, c'est la vie. Think I'll pig out on pepperoni pizza and then cry myself to sleep- again!
Their theory of subjectivity (for whatever Spivak may say, they do have such a theory) views the modern subject as a molar outgrowth of capitalism.
Which is how come more peeps aint eating their own shit the way Nietzsche intended.
Indeed, they theorise that subjectivity arises from ‘subjection’, a specifically capitalist linguistic/representational process (distinct from earlier ‘machinic enslavement’), and devote considerable space to demonstrating its mechanisms (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 456‐9; Guattari 1996: 141‐7).
Are you eating your own shit for breakfast? No? It is because Capitalism has subjugated you. Get busy chopping off your own dick and one day soon Capitalism will disappear only to be replaced by a truly enlightened coprophagy.
Nor is it clear that Deleuze and Guattari celebrate ‘any desire’ resisting ‘any power’. Their theory, advanced over many thousands of pages, is far more nuanced than this.
Because saying 'eat your own shit' wouldn't carry the same intellectual frisson.
For instance, they distinguish between types of desire (active and reactive, ‘schizophrenic’ and ‘paranoiac’), siding clearly with those which perform certain functions
e.g. eating their own shit
rather than others. All desires infuse the social field, but divide into two types of ‘delirium’ or psychological complex, the ‘fascisizing [fascisant]’ type which disinvests every ‘free’ figure of desire and invests central sovereignty, and the ‘schizorevolutionary type or pole that follows the lines of escape of desire; breaches the wall and causes flows to move; assembles its machines and its groups‐in‐fusion in the enclaves or at the periphery’, producing an inverse effect (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 277).
The French refused to accept that it was sane English speaking people like Churchill and Roosevelt who delivered them from Nazism. Left to themselves, they would have chopped off their own balls while eating their own shit in the hope that this would cause Hitler to run away.
Spivak and her ilk, merely ran away from shithole countries so as to make a living scolding Whitey for permitting dicks to exist even though dicks cause RAPE!
As for challenging 'Eurocentrism', that is best done by Boko Haram. Kill people who can read. That way, 'colonial epistemology' will perish.
Stuff like this '?
Can one discuss the rise of Hindu communalism – its complicity with neoliberalism, its connections to male Brahmin power,
the Dynasty is Brahmin. People want Priyanka but they are stuck with Rahul. But the founder of the Dynasty was a Socialist. True, Nehru presided over a vast ethnic cleansing of Muslims but he wasn't a fan of Hinduism either.
and in spite of this its appeal to some among the worse‐off, even at the expense of the left – without a theory of reactive desire which goes against interests?
What went against the interests of the poor was the Communist policy of grabbing their land and handing it to billionaire industrialists. That's how a Brahmin woman, Mamta Bannerjee, crushed the Commies in West Bengal.
In a recent work addressing these various phenomena, Arjun Appadurai (2006)
'Fear of small numbers'. It was stupid shit. Obviously, the collapse of the Soviet Union would endanger its clients or gerontocratic Communist/Socialist single party rule. Various ethnic groups would seek to back control of territories where they were the majority or else had a historical claim.
provides an explanation, in terms of active and reactive structures, remarkably similar to Deleuze’s.
It was useless shite. He didn't predict the demise of the Left Front. To be fair, few did. The Tatas thought the Commies would try to imitate Deng. But their goons soon switched sides after the TMC got better at beating them.
In Appadurai, as in Deleuze, one finds the focus shifted from economic interests to libidinal attachments; categories of rhizomatic and arborescent (here rephrased as vertebrate and cellular) come to the fore.
Real Estate is valuable coz God aint making any more of it. People fight over territory. Deal with it.
Can one really explain the paradoxes of such ‘predatory’ movements without venturing outside the field of ‘interests’?
Brain dead Marxists may think that proles will all love each other coz their true enemy is the Capitalist. But the Great War had shown this simply wasn't true.
When Spivak herself discusses Hindu communalism, it is noticeable that she, too, quietly replaces interest‐derivation with a theory of complex symbolic motivation (304).
Her people kept getting raped and killed in East Bengal unless they had had the sense to run away. Quite naturally, she didn't want to dwell too much on this topic.
Hence, we would argue, Deleuze’s privileging of desire over interest is entirely apt.
It is silly. The fact is, proles don't really hate Capitalists or love proles in distant countries.
It is also entirely possible to theorise sanctioned ignorance or lacunae from within a Deleuzian frame.
Because it is also entirely possible to theorize eating your own shit in a Deleuzian frame.
That dominant systemic discourses contain lacunae is implicit in the Deleuzian rendering of Lacanian theory
shite rendering shite
as a reductive depiction of neurotic or ‘paranoiac’ thought.
How neurotic to have to be not to eat your own delicious turds?
To be within ‘Oedipus’, to be trapped without the ‘little bit of the outside’, is to be within ‘reality’ in the (negatively‐loaded) Lacanian sense of a closed imaginary/symbolic construct, which is also to be within Althusserian ‘ideology’, a concept largely modelled after Lacan’s.
If you believe Freudian shite you might also believe Marxist shite. That's how stupidity works.
Where Deleuze and Guattari break with Lacan is not in the depth and complexity of his inner account of neurosis, but rather, in his (or his followers’) insistence that this underlying neurosis is ‘necessary’, ‘constitutive’ and ethically desirable.
If you are practicing a fraudulent type of medicine it is highly desirable for you to have paying customers who are as gullible as shit.
For Deleuze and Guattari, echoing Sahlins, lack is constituted by the dominant system,
which is why Stone Age people lacked i-phones. The dominant system was totes into Blackberries.
organised through social production so as to prop up a system which requires scarcity (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 28; Sahlins 2004).
Stone Age capitalists created scarcity by meanly refusing to throw stones at each other.
They can thus import unaltered much of the explanatory structure of Lacanian or Althusserian theory, dropping simply the supplementary claims of constitutivity.
You can drop claims of having constituted your own shit because people are sufficiently grossed out by the fact that you are eating it. The plain fact is 'Eurocentrism' disappeared because Europeans did stupid shit. American hegemony is disappearing because, as Obama said, American foreign policy is to do stupid shit. China too may fuck up. Meanwhile, smart peeps will do sensible things if not in shithole countries which listen to crazy Professors, then in countries which have ceased to be or are ceasing to be shitholes.
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