Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life: Deleuze and Guattari’s “Revolutionary” Semiotics

“Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life”: Deleuze and Guattari’s “Revolutionary” Semiotics Eugene W. Holland F OUCAULT IS RIGHT, in his preface to the English translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s A n ti-O ed ip u sto designate the work’s “ strategic adversary” as fascism—as long as we understand (as he goes on to explain) that what is at stake here is “ not [the] historical fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (p. xiii). If the prac­ tical import of the work is thus the impetus it provides to “ ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior” (p. xiii), its primary topical reference (the book first appeared in 1972) lay in its effort to explain the events of May 1968: both the radical nature of the new student and worker demands and the reactionary nature of the opposition voiced by the Communist Party and other supposedly “ radical” institutions. Finally, and despite Foucault’s warning not to mistake the work for ‘‘the new theoretical reference” (p. xii), it does have considerable theoretical interest, notably in the way it reads the three major forms of 19thcentury materialism: against one another. Foucault may be right that the Anti-Oedipus is not some grand synthesis of these systems of thought, is not “ that much-heralded theory that finally encompasses everything, that finally totalizes and reassures” (p. xii). But the “ materialist psy­ chiatry” Deleuze and Guattari propose under the name of “ schizoanalysis ” does arise from the interference between Marxian, Nietzschean and Freudian materialisms: parts of the Freudian conceptual apparatus are retained, but are then grafted onto a historical perspective derived in part from the Marxian notion of modes of production; the basic valuesystem of schizoanalysis, finally, is grounded in a Nietzschean critique of consciousness and celebration of unconscious will-to-power.2 The lines of interference among these materialisms meet in a notion of general semiosis that includes the investment of energy in all domains of human endeavor, from the production of value in a factory, for exam­ ple, to the production of consensus in a political formation, to the pro­ duction of meaning in a work of art. Marx and Freud provide the frame­ works for understanding semiosis in the domains of society (creation and Vol. XXVII, No. 2 19 L ’E sp r it C r é a t e u r circulation of value) and the individual psyche (derivation and distribu­ tion of affect), respectively. What enables Deleuze and Guattari to link these two realms in a new way is their concept of production: for schizoanalysis , desire (understood as the investment of human energy) pro­ duces reality, both in the economic sense of labor-power shaping the material world and in the cognitive sense of psychic drives shaping the phenomenal world (as when an attorney “ produces” [“ presents or shows for inspection” ] evidence in a court of law). Hence the insistence that “ desire is part of the infrastructure” (p. 104 and passim): libidinal and social production are for schizoanalysis simply two domains of application of the same general semiosis. This deployment of semiotic categories that are psychological and social at the same time is made possible by a three-fold critique of psychoanalysis. For one thing, Deleuze and Guattari mount a poststructuralist critique of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis; at the same time, they ground schizoanalysis in a Nietzschean critique of consciousness and its relations to the body; finally, they insert libidinal semiotics into a history of social production by means of a typology of modes of semiotic production derived partly from Nietzsche and mostly (particularly as regards the capitalist mode of production) from Marx. One aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s poststructuralist critique of psychoanalysis involves their version of the “ critique of representation” (see esp. chap. II sections 1& 7, chap. Ill sections 3, 5, 7 & 10, and chap. IV, section 3). This line of thought distinguishes three elements in any representation: the representation itself (the signifier), the thing being represented (the referent), and the image or concept (the signified) the representation substitutes...