Future Primitive Revisited by John Zerzan

Author:John Zerzan [Zerzan, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781936239306
Publisher: Feral House
Published: 2012-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

DELEUZE, GUATTARI

AND BAUDRILLARD

Gilles Deleuze’s “schizo-politics” flow, at least in part, from the prevailing pm refusal of overview, of a point of departure. Also called “nomadology,” employing “rhizomatic writing,” Deleuze’s method champions the deterritorialization and decoding of structures of domination, by which capitalism will supersede itself through its own dynamic. With his sometime partner Felix Guattari, with whom he shares a specialization in psychoanalysis, he hopes to see the system’s schizophrenic tendency intensified to the point of shattering. Deleuze seems to share, or at least comes very close to, the absurdist conviction of Yoshimoto Takai that consumption constitutes a new form of resistance.

This brand of denying the totality by the radical strategy of urging it to dispose of itself also recalls the impotent pm style of opposing representation: meanings do not penetrate to a center, they do not represent something beyond their reach. “Thinking without representing,” is Charles Scott’s description of Deleuze’s approach. Schizo-politics celebrates surfaces and discontinuities; nomadology is the opposite of history.

Deleuze also embodies the postmodern “death of the subject” theme, in his and Guattari’s best-known work, Anti-Oedipus, and subsequently. “Desiringmachines,” formed by the coupling of parts, human and nonhuman, with no distinction between them, seek to replace humans as the focus of his social theory. In opposition to the illusion of an individual subject in society, Deleuze portrays a subject no longer even recognizably anthropocentric. One cannot escape the feeling, despite his supposedly radical intention, of an embrace of alienation, even a wallowing in estrangement and decadence.

In the early ‘70s Jean Baudrillard exposed the bourgeois foundations of marxism, mainly its veneration of production and work, in his Mirror of Production (1972). This contribution hastened the decline of marxism and the Communist Party in France, already in disarray after the reactionary role played by the Left against the upheavals of May ‘68. Since that time, however, Baudrillard has come to represent the darkest tendencies of postmodernism and has emerged, especially in America, as a pop star to the ultra-jaded, famous for his fully disenchanted views of the contemporary world. In addition to the unfortunate resonance between the almost hallucinatory morbidity of Baudrillard and a culture in decomposition, it is also true that he (along with Lyotard) has been magnified by the space he was expected to fill following the passing, in the ‘80s, of relatively deeper thinkers like Barthes and Foucault.

Derrida’s deconstructive description of the impossibility of a referent outside of representation becomes, for Baudrillard, a negative metaphysics in which reality is transformed by capitalism into simulations that have no backing. The culture of capital is seen as having gone beyond its fissures and contradictions to a place of self-sufficiency that reads like a rather science-fiction rendering of Adorno’s totally administered society. And there can be no resistance, no “going back,” in part because the alternative would be that nostalgia for the natural, for origins, so adamantly ruled out by postmodernism.

“The real is that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.” Nature has been so far left behind that culture determines materiality; more specifically, media simulation shapes reality.

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