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The problem of critique is that of the value of values, of the evaluation from which their value arises, thus the problem of their creation.
Gilles Deleuze – Nietzsche and Philosophy[1]
In 1972, at a symposium titled ‘Nietzsche Today?’ held in the remote French town of Cerisy-la-Salle, Gilles Deleuze presented the following statement: “Marx and Freud may be the dawn of our culture, but Nietzsche is quite another thing, the dawn of a counterculture.”[2] The implication Deleuze was making is clear. Seen within the history of critique, Marx and Freud had become paradigmatic, yet outdated figures. Their combined theories of society, history and subjectivity – still then the cultural foundations of modern thought – were a set of analyses identifiable as the status quo: as static, homogenous and non-productive modes of critique. Conversely, Deleuze saw in Nietzsche a radical and marginalised force. Through his introduction of the concept of genealogy and the will-to-power, Deleuze saw in Nietzsche a rejection of all that had come before him: the value of values of themselves; the a priori value of judgment. Known in Nietzsche’s own words as the process of ‘philosophising with a hammer’, Deleuze saw in his philosophy the birth of a new form of productive critique; one that could overcome the passive nihilism and deterministic readings of life found in the history of political philosophy and modern critical thought.
The purpose of this essay will be to analyse the conceptual singularities present in Deleuze & Guattari’s formulation of ‘desiring-production’ – as articulated in their work Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) – through a reading of Marx’s philosophy of history and Nietzsche’s own radical conception of genealogical critique. By doing so I hope to highlight the productive nature of desire if thought of as a differential mode of critique. This will require an investigation into the genealogy of desire in Marx and its subsequent repurposing by Deleuze through Nietzsche. A full analysis of the more explicit notions of desire found in modern critical theory will not be possible here, such as in the psychoanalytic libidinal economy of Freud. Nonetheless, by articulating the ontological status of Deleuzo-Guattarian desire, I hope to demonstrate how the divergent claims of orthodox Marxism in philosophies of history and subjectivity are equally unable to compensate for the alinear, contingent and emergent properties of complex socio-material assemblages.
Genealogy and the Philosophy of History
In his book Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Deleuze noted that “Nietzsche’s relation to Kant is like Marx’s to Hegel: Nietzsche stands critique on its feet, just as Marx does with the dialectic.” He continues to say, “this analogy, far from reconciling Marx and Nietzsche, separates them still further.” The significance of this statement is manifestly twofold. On the one hand Deleuze situates both Nietzsche and Marx at points of critical exegesis. This is an observation mirrored in both Nietzsche and Marx’s own self-images as standing on the brink of historical rupture; a sentiment succinctly expressed in the former’s proclamation: “I am not a human being, I am dynamite.” This is true, in so far as both of their analyses anticipated a radical, ‘inevitable’ shift in the history of social consciousness: the Death of God or Communist revolution. Crucial for Deleuze, is that the process of critique is necessarily concerned with a production of new entities. As we shall see, the affirmational philosophy of Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, conceptualised through the immanent plane of desiring-production, is a positive critique. This is not to say that powers of decay, entropy and collapse are ignored. Rather that the model of critique needed for an analysis of the ‘value of values’ is not negative, viz. determined by processes of dialectical negation.
Secondly, that Marx and Nietzsche are separated by this conceptual fissure: between positive and negative, productive and non-productive forms of critique. As we have previously seen, for Deleuze Marx and Freud were theorists too deeply embedded in the culture they sought to critique. The latter of which was explicated by philosopher Hannah Arendt in no uncertain terms: “if Freud had lived and carried on his inquiries in a country and language other than the German-Jewish milieu which supplied his patients, we might never have heard of an Oedipus complex.” It is of no coincidence that Deleuze & Guattari’s most lucid expression of subjectivity and social formations – desiring-production – would later come in their seminal work ‘Anti-Oedipus’. However, it is the similar contention of Marx’s own historicist capitulation that must necessarily reconstruct itself through their assertion, contra-Hegel, that “universal history is the history of contingencies, and not the history of necessity.” For this, as Louis Althusser quips, it requires a Marx who has not “merely thought within the limits of [his] present”. And as Deleuze & Guattari will demonstrate, a Marx reconciled with a Nietzschean genealogy of difference in the concept of desiring-production.
Taking precedence in Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), Marx’s philosophy of history was conditioned by a materialist critique of what he termed the ‘German Ideologists’. Just as the former work had challenged Hegel’s philosophical Idealism, asserting an anthropological reading of religious Spirit as sensual matter, Marx recognised the potential for a new conception of philosophical history in the material culture of social relations; a historical materialism. Unlike his adversaries in the Young-Hegelians, this model would not be based in the self-realising tendencies of Spirit, nor the independent drive of Absolute reason. For Marx, the history of all social relations and their subsequent futures was bound up in the material infrastructure of class struggle. And as such, the history and fate of all social forms were bound together through a dialectical process of social antagonism. However, given this framework’s basis in the resolution of contradictory social forces – between the relations of production and the means of production – dialectical materialism traces a clear conceptual lineage to Hegel’s own use of dialectical negation. Therefore, it is an orthodox conception of dialectical materialism which posits the inevitable rise of universal socialism and equally provides the teleological dimension of capitalism based in negative difference which Deleuze, via Nietzsche, so doggedly critiques when he says: “History progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming differences. It is no less bloody and cruel as a result. Only the shadows of history live by negation.”
Thus, the formula of historical discourse typically ascribed to a Marxist philosophy of history, the negation of the negation, that which Marx states in Capital as the “inexorability of a law of Nature” – the inherent trajectory of social development per se – is the assumption forthright that at “a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. [...] From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.” For Deleuze, this premise traps a reading of Marx within the material conditions of his own critique; a conception of history and value which registers difference and change through Enlightenment narratives of rationality, identity and negation. The ‘inexorable law’ – the inevitable tendency of capitalism toward its own negation – is that which Frederic Jameson similarly highlights in his essay ‘Marx and Historicism’ as the teleological dimension of orthodox Marxism; one which inverts Hegel’s transcendental subject of Spirit through a materialist subject of class. Viewed this way, Marxist dialectics purport a set of fixed, purposeful and closed systems of development, eliding in their linear progression a multiplicity of contingent historical encounters. Thus, the difference between these thinkers – Marx and Hegel – lies not in the essence of their ontological critique – which remains fundamentally the same – but simply the face of their transcendental subject (be it God, Spirit or class). This ostensible shift, from religious dogma to the structural conditions of dialectical thought, not only annuls the common systemic notion that underpins each of their theological propositions – namely, the construction a natural law of history – but given that theological continuity, the foregoing premise continues to beg the question: “how are we to understand […] the historicism of Hegel and Marx as latent forms of Christianity, as tremendous and gruesome shadows of God”?
In his work, Thoughts on Death and Immorality (1830), Feuerbach speaks of Christianity as a reaction to, and answer for, the inherently alinear, formless and contingent foundations of emergent Life: “Nature develops its unlimited creative power in unrestricted multiplicity, independence, separation, severing, determining, and distinguishing. […] This wildly agitated whirlpool of material nature, [this] is called life!” Given what we have already established, that there remains a continuity of theological essence between the logic of Christian dogma and the dialectical thought of either Hegel or Marx, Feuerbach’s critique seems to eminently posit the theoretical impasse found in each model of universal history. What is key to Feuerbach’s theoretical contention in Christianity, is that it presupposes a systemic inability to account for the role of Life’s inherent contingencies and nonlinear dynamics, a process it disavows through its own propositions. Deleuze’s provocation is no less similar. The fluctuations and heterogeneity of historical development necessary for Deleuze’s ‘universal history of contingencies’ equally depends on an analysis of Marxist dialectics as inattentive to the true conditions of history as contingent, nonlinear and affirmative. For Deleuze it is a question of substituting a strict epistemology of capitalist axioms – dialectical contradiction within the means and relations of production – with an ontology of pure difference: the flows, territories and codifications of social desire. A system of historical becoming that Deleuze & Guattari find in the historical writings of Marx himself.
Indeed, this is nowhere clearer than in their assertion that universal history can only be seen as a history of contingencies, “provided that the rules formulated by Marx are followed exactly.” The central text used to excavate this multilinear, anti-dialectical Marx is his 1857 study of ‘Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations’, within which Deleuze & Guattari discern two key examples of the contingency of Marxist universal history: the anomalous cases of ancient Rome and the much-contested notion of the Asiatic mode of production. The former of these two examples is elucidated by Marx during a brief correspondence in 1877 with the Russian literary magazine Otechestvennye Zapiski, when in retort to sociologist and Narodnik leader Nikolai Mikhailovsky’s attempt to transmute Marx’s “historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the general path every people is fated to tread” – in so far as the Russian Populists would therefore “have to take an active part in the process which separates the means of production and of labor, expropriates the peasants, mutilates the human organism, threatens the future of the human race” – Marx references the counter-intuitive fate of the Roman plebeians:
And so one fine morning there were tom, be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in their possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings […] there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but based on slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historical surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by using as one’s master key a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being supra-historical.
This analysis is continued in Deleuze & Guattari’s appropriation of Marx’s Asiatic mode of production – the peculiar case of the simultaneous presence of autonomous village communities, an absence of private ownership of land and a despotic centralised state – one which countered any clear progression within a Eurocentric analysis of Marxist historiography. Indeed, the presence of a State appropriating surplus-labour without the precondition of private property stood anathema to traditional theories of historical materialism which understood the State as an instrument of the dominant class in relation to the ownership of the means of production. Marx himself saw the Asiatic mode of production as a contingent and differential model of historical becoming, as he continues in his correspondence with the Russian Populists to assert, albeit negatively, “If Russia continues to pursue the path she has followed since 1861, she will lose the finest chance ever offered by history to a nation, in order to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.” His insinuation of the contingency of historical development found in the conditions of the Asiatic mode of production, coupled with the various historical encounters of deterritorialized labour and concentrated money-value, lead Deleuze & Guattari to the conclusion that capitalism as we know it may never have taken place, with the opportunity for “free workers and money-capital existing “virtually” side by side.”
Elaborating this point further, Jameson goes on to explain, “The dilemma of any “historicism” can then be dramatized by the peculiar, unavoidable, yet seemingly unresolvable alternation between Identity and Difference.” The former of which is, for Deleuze, untenable. For in his analysis of the dialectic – as it is in Nietzsche’s – Deleuze sees the mechanistic logic of negation as incapable of truly accounting for the notion of historical difference, relegating this notion to a subsidiary epistemology of the thing – be that of class, Spirit or fixed social relations. It is his dissonant claim that, in its ontological specificity, difference exists in and of itself, as difference-in-itself, and that this difference is the radical potential of Nietzsche’s historical genealogy: of a positive model of critique. This requires for Deleuze a re-reading of Marx through Nietzsche – a Marx transposed from the history of necessity to the contingency of will.
