Beyond Baudrillard Part Two

Against the Fatal Strategy

Baudrillard in his texts posits the death of the social as a totalizing form that we can describe as a scene, with perfectly defined characters and movements. This is for two reasons, the death of forms due to their over-categorization and the overall death of the real. The social is the scene of all interactions between subjects, it is the totalizing discourse that many in the post-structuralist milieu become trapped in as their theories become lost in a web of ever-exchangeable systems. Yet, to Baudrillard, this scene only exists in an attempt to hide the obscene and irrational reality that lies beneath. It is a third-order simulacrum, an image or form that hides the absence of such forms. More broadly, this movement from the real to the simulacra describes the phenomenon of hyperreality, which reveals the entirety of the traditional social scene as obscene. Baudrillard does not deny that there are social interactions between people, but he does show that we cannot posit a reality that codifies how those interactions take place. If we are to use more Foucauldian terminology we could state that the positing of the social, with its readily defined subjects and potentialities, is a subjectification. This presents a problem to those who seek to use potentially liberatory forces, such as the desire of Deleuze and the power Foucault, as these forms are fundamentally tied to a prior conception of the social. Now Foucault, despite Deleuze posits desire as the basis of the libidinal economy, an economy prior and more fundamental to the political economy of Marx. His broad descriptions of desire across the social through his schizoanalysis of the family, the state, capital, etc all posit a seemingly perfect explanation for every movement of desire. The same goes for Foucault, who in his definition of power posits it as a social form. This is found in his work The History of Sexuality: Volume One where he states:

“Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society.” (Foucault, 1976, pg. 91).

Power in Foucault, while certainly resulting from the realm of the personal, is a conceptual system theorized through genealogy. Foucault’s project is to describe various outliers within the social through genealogy, speaking on madness, punishment, sexuality, etc. Each thinker also posits their form as a potential liberatory one. Deleuze states we can deterritorialize out of the various micro-fascisms we find regulating desire. Foucault gives various resistances to the dominant form of power he observes in the world, biopower. These forms of resistance would go on to inform both the thinkers associated with Tiqqun and the post-anarchism of Newman. If these forms are located in the social, how can we posit any liberatory prospect? As was previously outlined, an insurrectionary subjectivity must be posited to resist Baudrillard’s insurrection of the object. In short, we must go directly against the fatal strategy. To do this this insurrectionary subjectivity must be outlined, which will use the egoistic philosophy of Stirner to posit a subjectivity without basis. Along with this, these various liberatory potentials towards affirmation must be located within this subjectivity. Our goal is not to reconstruct a localized theory of desire and power, as that would be just to make a new dominant form rule the subjective, but instead to use the liberatory potential each form gives within a new context. Concerning the theories themselves and how they describe the social, their usefulness cannot be denied. What must be done with both of the analyses is to position themselves outside the totalized and lost social, instead repurposed to describe the subjective. This is not to fall into the same trap that Baudrillard in Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? describes. Rather power and desire must be used in the way Deleuze wished for philosophy to be done, with concepts used as tools that are used rather than the basis of metaphysical truth.

To engage in either project, the construction of liberatory potential in the wake of Baudrillard’s critique and the use of Foucault and Deleuze’s analysis in the subjective context, our vision of subjectivity must first be defined. To do this is to do what Baudrillard did to Foucault in Forget Foucault, to out-Nietzsche Baudrillard. To do this involves perhaps even going beyond Nietzsche and instead turning to Stirner. Now this is not to say our goal of an insurrectionary subjectivity cannot be achieved by other thinkers, including some readings of Nietzsche himself, but Stirner goes perhaps the farthest and is the easiest to use. Now to posit this subjectivity is not to posit a subject, after all, Stirner, Levinas, Foucault, Deleuze, etc already reveal how the subject has been constructed. The subject is not a priori but rather comes from various processes both internal and external. Along with this, Baudrillard shows that by constructing these subjects we create the equivalent of humanism whenever we take their side. Our goal is not some Feuerbachian humanism, a simple reaction against the fatal strategy to turn back to naive fetishization, but rather to subvert this paradigm altogether. This is to construct an anti-humanist notion of subjectivity, one fit for the insurrectionary potential we are seeking. Subjectivity is also not a concept in the typical sense here, as to posit a conceptualized vision of subjectivity would be just to create a new pole that falls to the same attack Baudrillard does towards the traditional subject. Rather our notion of subjectivity is a placeholder, a placeholder for the ultimately indescribable nature of subjectivity. While a placeholder, this is not a thing in itself or noumena in the Kantian sense, as that would be to place a transcendent subjectivity above us. No, this is not a placeholder for something placed above us, but for a basis that grounds us, that we are immanent towards. Just as all concepts are ultimately floating in the sense that they can never be perfectly assigned to a signified, a notion of subjectivity that tries to establish limits or boundaries ultimately boxes and restricts subjectivity. The most radical philosophy we can have towards subjectivity is to not have a philosophy at all, to assert a lack of definitive assertion. Lack in this case allows a freedom of assertion for subjectivity; it gives the possibility of liberatory potentials.

This subjectivity is best stated by Stirner through his notion of the unique and the creative nothing, the supposed end of philosophy. If we are to take philosophy as the creation of conceptions, as Deleuze and Guattari do, our approach to subjectivity must be anti-philosophical. Baudrillard has already revealed the seduction of concepts, which leads to the victory of the object and the fatal strategy, thus we must focus on the pre-conceptual. Before we conceptualize subjectivity into a Freudian ego, done both through Foucault’s subjectification and through individual creation, there is a non conceptual nothingness. This is not a nothingness in the sense of a non-being, but a creative nothingness. The creative nothing is the nothing from which we create everything, from which we conceptualize and stratify our world. Subjectivity here becomes a totality of all experience, as ultimately all experience and all creation is in the context of subjectivity. Creative nothingness is the most radical of anti-essentialism, as it posits that at the basis of subjectivity there is no foundation, nothing we can grasp upon to ground our approach. If we are unable to posit a conception at the basis of subjectivity, it cannot be posited as a conception or object at all. With this lack of basis, the claim that objects can have some proper foundation also becomes faulty. Stirner comes to explain this through his notion of the unique. The unique is the idea that names don’t name their signified, they are the equivalent of placeholders for the fundamentally indescribable. To be clear, this is not a repositioning of the Kantian thing in itself or noumena, which states that this indescribability is something transcendent to human knowledge. Rather the unique is simply something that a signified cannot be placed upon without reducing it, it posits every signifier as floating. What the unique subjectivity describes could be said to be immanent to subjectivity, in contrast to Kantian transcendence, but that would be to reduce it all the same. Stirner shows what he means by the unique here:

“Stirner names the unique and says at the same time that “Names don’t name it.” He utters a name when he names the unique, and adds that the unique is only a name. So he thinks something other than what he says, just as, for example, when someone calls you Ludwig, he isn’t thinking of a generic Ludwig, but of you, for whom he has no word.” (Stirner, 1847, pg. 7).

When Stirner talks of the unique individual, in this case Feuerbach for whom he is responding to, he names it but at the same time posits that names don’t name it. This is the crux of the unique, an object when posited as an object always reduces what the object is attempting to describe. Any attempt at a philosophy of individuality that posits an objective subject will always get caught in this problem and will fall to the fatal strategy. Now of course the subject is not the only thing within the unique’s range of application, the assassin of philosophy sets its sights on all objects. This is due to universal application of subjectivity, as the creative nothing in its creation produces the stratification of objects within our subjective experience. It does not matter if we are subjectified, or if much of our categorizations come from facticity, as ultimately applying these preexisting categories is an act of creation in itself. Stirner writes:

“What Stirner says is a word, a thought, a concept; what he means is neither a word, nor a thought, nor a concept. What he says is not the meaning, and what he means cannot be said.” (Stirner, 1847, pg. 7).

When the philosopher, in this case Stirner, creates a work of philosophy, they work in concepts. But what they mean is not a concept, the concept always reduces subjective expression. One creates concepts as philosophical weapons, just as we are doing now, but their actual danger comes from the subjective attacks they represent. All objects are thus in essence floating, which means that their seduction can be displaced through the non-conceptual subjectivity they are always within the context of. Stirner extends an ethics from these anti-foundationalist notions, that of egoism. This ethics crucially is not a morality, but rather a path forward towards action without a foundation. To be an egoist is to base one’s cause on nothing, to not be beholden to idols and sacred causes. It is not narcissistic egotism, which posits an artificial ego as above all others, but rather subverts the idea of a fundamental ego at all.

From our vision of subjectivity we can recover the theories of Deleuze and Foucault from the disappearance of the social. Deleuze in his philosophy, along with Guattari in this case, created the conception of schizoanalysis which defined itself through its attempt to de-oedipalize and observe the general trends of desiring production across society. This approach set out to create a materialist psychology, one grounded on an analysis of the libidinal economy that subverts the systems of Marxism and psychoanalysis. Schizoanalysis, as the name implies, works through the idea of the schizophrenic and its desiring production. Unlike Lacan and Jameson, who posit schizophrenia as a tendency within capitalism that displaces identity, Deleuze and Guattari view schizophrenia as the limit of the social. Baudrillard has two main critiques of this approach, that it is both too perfect and that it posits a wider force that has already disappeared. To start with the latter, as to answer the former we have to answer the latter, Deleuze and Guattari outline a very idiosyncratic notion of desire and the social. They are in no way humanists, or theorists that posit a standard view of the subject. Thus Baudrillard has no real way to give a critique of their social as a scene of norms, as Deleuze and Guattari can be seen just as Baudrillard as philosophers of obscenity. What is more obscene than the schizophrenic or its power wielded in schizoanalysis? Yet where Baudrillard takes issue is when they posit desire as a totalizing social phenomena and even moreso when desire is posited as a potential liberatory force. Desire is the new explanation for everything, just as economic forces were to Marx. Baudrillard claims that schizoanalysis’ account of desire in its perfection and totalization is symbolically equivalent with both the theories of Foucault and Marx, thus remaining stuck in metaphysics and ultimately not providing any innovation. Now while this goes to far in many respects, Deleuze and Guattari’s work is after all one of the most innovative philosophies, it does correctly critique some of Deleuze and Guattari’s systematic tendencies. Just as the traditional scene of the social in liberalism, with its rational actors and concept of freedom, posits a transformative actor in the humanist subject, schizoanalysis posits desire as a main transformative actor. While its analysis is far more advanced and in depth, it still acts as something to be subverted by Baudrillard’s fatal strategy.

Within Deleuze’s wider philosophy, outside of his creation of schizoanalysis with Guattari, we find the problem of systematization and universalization appearing. The plane of immanence for instance, despite Deleuze and Guattari’s best efforts to posit it as preconceptual, is itself a conception placed as a basis. Now this conception does not have the same issue as Spinoza’s universal substance, as immanence is declared to be immanent to itself. There is no necessary transcendent substance to be declared to be immanent, rather it is an absolute immanence. Immanence is not of concern here, as we can pose that subjectivity requires immanence as any transcendent notion of subjectivity creates a transcendent subject of some form. This is the issue with most phenomenology, as it posits a transcendent notion of subjectivity through the transcendent subject. Deleuze and Guattari rightfully observe that all transcendence can be reduced to immanence, immanence must always be prior to transcendence, yet what is of concern is the conceptualization of immanence through the plane of immanence. A similar issue occurs back within schizoanalysis with the body without organs. Within the work of Deleuze and Guattari concepts often mirror each other in function. The body without organs is the symbolic equivalent of the plane of immanence, the former being the basis of desire and the latter being the basis of philosophy. With both occurrences the solution to repositiom these theories from Baudrillard’s criticisms, though it should be clear at this point that Baudrillard’s critique does not hold the weight it seemingly has, is to position it within our notion of subjectivity.

These affirmative forces of desire and concept creation, both described through the conception of the machine, can be described not as affirmations of a preconceived social but instead as the affirmative potential of subjectivity. This tendency can already be seen within the works of Deleuze, most crucially Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari write:

“Nothing here is representative; rather, it is all life and lived experience: the actual, lived emotion of having breasts does not resemble breasts, it does not represent them, any more than a predestined zone in the egg resembles the organ that it is going to be stimulated to produce within itself. Nothing but bands of intensity, potentials, thresholds, and gradients.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972. Pg. 42).

This lived experience is where we are grounding our overcoming of the fatal strategy, as this lived experience is crucially before the conceptualization of said experience. If we are to place desire in this context we can properly claim it as revolutionary, or more accurately insurrectionary, once again. Desiring production is not necessarily transformative, but ours is if we make it so. This insurrectionary basis within everyday life can of course be observed in Stirner, but also within the works of Vaneigem. His work The Revolution of Everyday Life is crucial for any understanding of this idea. Vaneigem perhaps has the most adept understanding of insurrectionary gestures, of pure life and what it means to construct situations. All other formulations are either caught up in a systemization of what the situation is (Debord), or are obscured by the failure of 68. In Vaneigem there is the simplest but most radical approach available: to live and to refuse. Also of use is Culp’s idea of a Dark Deleuze, which tries to get the same insurrectionary potentials out of Deleuze’s work in opposition to numerous normalizing interpretations. Here he rejects the primacy of the rhizome, which obscures any possibility of escaping cybernetic discourse.

Foucault experiences a similar issue to Deleuze when faced with Baudrillard’s criticisms. Famously Foucault refused to reply to Forget Foucault, though it can be assumed that he did not take it kindly or merely dismissed it. Power and desire to Baudrillard have both disappeared along with the social. Both are exchangeable, hence why each author doesn’t touch on the object of the other. Foucault saw no real relevance to the notion of desire, viewing it as overly metaphysical in relation to the historical form of power. Deleuze, while discussing power, always sees it in the manner of captured desire. His notions of the control society and the apparatus of capture follow this tendency. There is no room for desire in Foucault because its place is already taken by power. Power is a social form, it is a specific phenomenon within society. It, like desire, ultimately creates the equivalent of a universalizing subject within the social. The perfection of power becomes its downfall to Baudrillard. However much like Deleuze, we can observe a tendency towards our subversive subjectivity. This can be seen in Foucault’s conception of biopower. Unlike Deleuze this is not posited as a potential revolutionary force, it is still very much a social phenomena that can be resisted. However it is specifically positioned within this lived subjectivity, analyzing how power creates willing subjects through the processes of subjectification and normalization. The everyday is made the subject of analysis as it is analyzed how power influences these decisions. A crucial aspect of this is the concept of self regulation, which Foucault famously explains through the idea of the panopticon. The current social systems we find ourselves within increasingly operate not through punishment, but through the idea of surveillance. We now regulate ourselves, just like the prisoner of the panopticon, unaware if we are watched or not watched. This positioning of power on the subjective level allows for subjective resistances to power, which Foucault was beginning to outline towards the end of his life. These potential strategies have been used by the theorists of post-anarchism, most importantly Newman. Now Baudrillard cannot be blamed for this as all he had at his disposal was Madness and Civilization and the first volume of The History of Sexuality, both of which presenting a far more systematic and “archeological” approach. Foucault’s work changed significantly throughout his life, refuting many of Baudrillard’s initial criticisms. Biopower, despite the death of the social, can still be used as a very useful tool within our analysis because it is not presented metaphysically. However it can never represent a totality, it is always porous. What must be done from here, much like with Deleuze, is to expand on these struggles against biopower.

As was previously noted, Newman’s post-anarchism is a very useful tool for the insurrectionary potential we are seeking. This is of course deeply informed by Stirner, positioning it within the approach we are seeking to find. Newman in his work From Bakunin to Lacan analyzes the place of power in post-structuralist mileu, crucially how these theorists struggled to find points of resistance. In this book he makes a critique, similar to that of Baudrillard, of Deleuze and Foucault. However this was crucially from a subjective position. Through Lacan’s notion of the real, which he breaks from its supposed disappearance through language, he finds what he calls an outside. This outside is no supposed physical outside, such as the Walden of Thoreau or the communes of Call, but is instead immanent to us at all times. Culp also makes very important contributions here with his essay “Insurrectionary Foucault” in wich he draws upon Tiqqun to characterize Foucault’s work as a genealogy of insurrection. Much like how Deleuze has been standardized and robbed of all radical potential by many theorists, Foucault has become a watered down neoliberal through the dismissal of his discourse on rebellion and ethics. Both present a vision of the outside distanced from the discourse of various right and left accelerationisms, which remain in the shadow of Baudrillard’s fatal strategy. Instead it provides a new ground for connection, affirmation, and overcoming.