Willing Slaves Of Capital: Spinoza And Marx On Desire by Lordon Frederic

Author:Lordon, Frederic [Lordon, Frederic]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE

Domination, Liberation

RETHINKING DOMINATION THROUGH CONSENT

Consent is thus most often tainted by a violence arising from the fact that it is strictly oriented towards the service of an external master-desire, and because it is obtained against a backdrop of a threat. There are nevertheless cases in which it manifests itself in the form of nearly pure complexes of joyful affects, almost unblemished by sad affects that are too weak to modify the overall feeling that one is moving according to a perfectly authentic personal desire. How then to continue speaking of domination when those concerned smile so innocently at their imposed employment? Calling attention to the rampant intentionality and the capture of effort by the master-desire is of no use, since the person would respond with a ‘This is really my choice’ that puts an end to the discussion. It is equally useless to suggest the idea of alienation, first because the person’s very affects offer a formal rebuttal, disproving the idea of their being a victim of a violence coming from outside, and because, as if by a practical Spinozist intuition, the recipient of the diagnosis of alienation could easily turn it against the questioner. For what privilege forbids imputing the same alienation to the latter, whose own enlistment seems to be experienced just as joyfully? Is not alienation subject to the same distortions as ideology, the latter polemically reduced to ‘what other people think’, while the former made to designate ‘other people’s passionate life’? To this the Spinozist would add the crucial point that passionate servitude is a universal condition, and to say that only some suffer from it reveals at least as much about the speakers as it does about those they describe.

But what remains of domination once alienation is universal and accompanied by joyful effects? Certainly, domination can still be defined as the asymmetrical relation arising from the fact that one person’s pursuit of his or her desire passes through another. The dependence of an interest on another person makes the interested person ipso facto dominated and that other person dominating. Employees, for example, have no other way of satisfying their interests except by going through a ‘buyer of labour-power.’ But the employee’s basal interest can be submerged under higher desires to which one’s job offers real satisfaction, to the point that the objective relation of dependence leaves no affective trace and can be imagined as meeting the ideal set by the economic theory of symmetrical and mutually beneficial exchanges, a successful union of a master-desire and an individual desire in which the latter feels that it is above all serving itself, and not a master. Yet despite all the benefits that the individual draws from it, enlistment is not without cost. For however successful it is, the process of epithumogenesis has the effect, and in fact the intention, of fixing the enlistees’ desire to a certain number of objects to the exclusion of others. Within capitalist organisations, the very function of hierarchical subordination is to

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