Libidinal Machines of Outburst or Lyotard's parenthesis of...

Lyotard's libidinal outburst / parenthesis of hatred in "The Desire Named Marx" as a proto progressive post-punk machine in solo mode.

Extract taken from Libidinal Economy by Jean Francois Lyotard (1974)



Every Political Economy Is Libidinal (contd)

How many iron bars, tonnes of sperm, decibels of carnal shrieks and factory noises, more and still more: this more may be invested as such, it is in capital, and it must be recognized that not only is it completely inane, we fully accept this, it is no more nor less vain than either political discussion on the agora or the Peloponnesian war, but it is especially necessary to recognize that this is not even a matter of production. These 'products' are not products, what counts here, in capital, is that they are endured and endured in quantity, it is the quantity, the imposed number that is itselfalready a motive for intensity, not the qualitative mutation ofquantity, not at all, but as in Sade the frightening number ofblows received, the number of postures and manoeuvres required, the necessary number of victims, as in Mina Boumedine, the abominable quantity of penises which penetrate through many entrances into the woman who works lying on the oilcloth on a table in the back room of a bar:

She sucks and shakes in a sweaty haze / she sucks the knobs waved in her face / she shudders as the trouser ies wound her / her vision reels I entrances and sham exits I awakening in hospital / the bar door grinds I Mina is this door / diastole and systole / her heart is going to burst / she attempts to count the openings of the door / she says to herself that she will become so many dicks / she loses count and retains the grinding / she is made to drink coca / she has a funny taste at the bottom of her throat I she is a wounded bird I a shivering bruised bird / she lies at the roadside I she has had an accident . . . You have counted well / not all the time / you rested against me yes all the time / I didn't leave you for a moment / the fortieth in the cunt alone / Mina in quarantine / I disgust you / tell me that I disgust you / I will play the whore for you / I will do my hundred a day on the oilcloth with the little blue squares / the smell of the acetylene torch / the whistling of the torch / the whistling of its suffering / she is dead assassinated / in the light of the wretches / she was dead here for months / for years / the hundred a day on the oilcloth in the back shop and the bucket of water / when she was nished to reawaken her / the frozen bucket of water / and all at once all over again the whistling of the lamp / then she was not dead / she was not dead enough / she had to start again. . .17 

Use erogenous zone numbers, more and still more, isn't this a decisive instantiation of intensity in capitalism? Are we, intellectual sirs, not actively or passively [passivons] 'producing' more and more words, more books, more articles, ceaselessly refilling the pot-boiler of speech, gorging ourselves on it rather, seizing books and 'experi­ ences', to metamorphose them as quickly as possible into other words, plugging us in here, being plugged in there, just like Mina on her blue squared oil cloth, extending the market and the trade in words of course, but also multiplying the chances of jouissance, scraping up intensities wherever possible, and never being suf ­ ciently dead, for we too are required to go from the forty to the hundred a day, and we will never play the whore enough, we will never be dead enough. And here is the question: Why, political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? In commiseration for what? I realize that a proletarian would hate you, you have no hatred because you are bourgeois, privileged smooth-skinncd types, but also because you dare not SAY the only important thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage  patés, swallowing tonnes of it till you burst - and because instead of saying this, which is also what happens in the desire of those who work with their hands, arses and heads, ah, you become a leader of men what a leader of pimps, you lean forward and divulge: ah, but that's alienation, it isn't pretty, hang on, we'll save you from it, we will work to liberate you from this wicked a affection for servitude, we will give you dignity. And in this way you situate yourselves on the most despicable side, the moralistic side where you desire that our capitalized's desire be totally ignored, forbidden, brought to a standstill, you arc like priests with sinners, our servile intensities frighten you, you have to tell yourselves: how they must su er to endure that! And of course we will suffer, we the capitalized, but this does not mean that we do not enjoy, nor that what you think you can offer us as a remedy - for what - does not disgust us, even more. We abhor therapeutics and its vaseline, we prefer to burst under the quantitative excesses that you judge the most stupid. And don't wait for our spontaneity to rise up in revolt either.

Let me open a parenthesis of hatred, here, a word will suffice against the great cesspool of consolations called spontaneity and creativity, that some dare to connect onto the courses, wayward certainly, but never vulgar until then, traced by the impulsions of Socialisme or barbarie in the eld of political practice and theory. 

In 1964, apparently over, questions of theory and orientation, we broke with Castoriadis who, rightly bored with reassessing historical, dialectic d diarrhoetic materialism, nevertheless proposed to put in its place the abominable super-male thing of generalized creativity: in mode capitalism, he explained (but read it your­selves, he is publishing his complete works ), the central problem is no longer exploitation, but the destruction of any real human communication, the annihilation of men's capacity to ceaselessly create, by themselves, sponte sua, new forms of relations with the world and with others. Against privatization, he brings back active socialization; against alienation, this always active creativity. Every­ where and always, creativity. From what do men (women, children, let's not leave anyone out) suffer in 'affluent' society? 

From their  solitude and from becoming passive; and why? Because their power to communicate and to love, their capacity to invent new responses, and to try them out on the most radical problems, is annihilated, he says, by the bureaucratic organization not only of their working lives, but of every aspect of their lives...... (A parenthesis of hatred on Castoriadis)

But of course, under the name (although it is very clumsily inherited from Trotskyism) of bureaucracy, we were quite in agreement that this had to be understood: not a new political phenomenon, not only an extension of the apparatus to new sectors of social life, not only thc simple consolidation of a new dominant social class, but moreovcr the production of anothcr humanity for which the revolutionary thought of making that we inherited after a fashion from Marx, even if this was through the entire leftist opposition, was no longer appropriate. And wc were quite in agreement that it was necessary, in a sense, 'to restart the revolu­tion', as the introductory text presented by Castoriadis and his group was entitled. Nevertheless, we went over to the adverse camp which continued Pouvoir Ouvrier for some time, a camp classed as traditionalist in questions of diamat and histmat, and which on the contrary should have been called a camp for refugees or homeless persons, so diverse were the preoccupations of those who found themselves in it, as the discords which erupted after the rst attempts at theoretical or practical research and the resignations show.

If mention a word on this subject, and on purpose a thoughtless word at that, it is: (1) because it serves nothing to shroud the affair in the solemn dress which tends to envelop 'Politics on the grand scale' and which is so inclined to maintain the already established myth of Socialisme ou barbarie, a myth that should be damned more than any other; 

(2) so that our readers are warned that our weighty predeces­ sors are as light as our successors; 

(3) so that they consider our ight into libidinal economy for what it is, the solution to a long pain and the breach out of a difficult impasse; 

(4) and so that they understand these few lines of hatred as thc expression of our laughter, behind our angst, at the hole that Castoriadis believed he had made, and made others believe he had made, in the wall which was obstructing everything we did as 'militants', our thoughts, our lives, our acts (and this was no small matter, it wasn't a question of having the party card, or selling political rags on a Sunday mo ing in the market), our laughter at, and against, this hole which connected us onto nothing which we already did not know, which did not make our bodies and heads ce towards unheard-of dispositions at all, but which wisely channelled them towards a 'new' vision of the world, towards a 'new' thinking, towards a humanism of creators at heart similar to that of some big, philanthropic American boss, towards a theory , yet again, a theory of generalized alienation which neces­sarily implied as its double a theory of generalized creativity - the only means known, since Hegel and undoubtedly Jesus as well, of not being alienated without being god. Therefore a 'new' religion, then, man made god, a Faustian religion which betrayed as ever and contin lied to betray its antiquatedness, as an innocent friend remarked to us one day, in the incoherence of the very expression 'worker's power'.

For 'worker', that ought to have been the taking into considera­tion of every force  [puissance] of what is dominated, and it is not thell a matter of revealing the scandal of power as what could console or cure him: not just because no-one has to judge it (and I am not even saying: if not the interested parties themselves - since it is no more them than any others, without doubt); but again because this force belonged to us as politicians, it was for us to lower the ag before it, to take it into full consideration, and then the perspective of power woulJ be abandoned, it should not have begun, as soon as it was perceived, and perceived in its extension, to be understood negatively, by nihilists refusing to call it force [puissance], the force of holding the untenable, and also the force of not holding it and making everything shake, the self included - hurrying, on the contrary, to call it privatization, passivation, alienation, loss of creativity, that is to say, hurrying to set it up as lack and present the maximum as the thing to bring about or bring back. Finally we need not have said: restart the revolution, instead, and this would have been the hole, we had to say: let's also eliminate the idea of revolution which became and which perhaps had always been a little nothing of an idea, the idea of a reversal of position in the sphere of political economic power and therefore the idea of aintaining this sphere, or even, to be fairer to Castoriadis, the idea of a reversal of position in all spheres; even this thought of a generalized reversal had to be broken in its turn, for it was once again a wall, the same wall of the same impasse, since where there is thought of reversal, there is the theory of alienation, nihilism and theoretician-saviours, heads, depositories of knowledge. 'Thinking heads arc always connected by invisible threads to the body of the people', a delighted Marx wrote to Meyer (21 January 1871).

This is where my hatred lies: knowledge carried on, we thought we had correct knowledge - how very sophisticated to know, knowing that one does not know, to know, presenting oneself sincerely as not knowing, to know how to construct in an open, decided, instigating way, the knowledge ultimately of an analyst -; and so, thanks to this piece of sophistication, we hoped to avoid adultery -not the thoroughly legal and well-sanctioned nuptials - of this knowledge with power, we said: we are militants who are no longer militants, we are no longer the bearers of good news, we put ourselves at the service of people when they desire to do something, a strike, a boycott, an occupation, etc. , whose rm is not established, we will be their agents, their go-between, we will draw up their tracts, circulate them, we will be almost non-existent -and I have to say that this was all well and good, this desire for a servant's position in the homes of these men who were born masters, this search for hysteria, Lacan said, for these inevitably paranoid militants. But we kept going with knowledge, since absolute mind may indeed make itself the servant, it must become the dialectical servant of all the regions it traverses, the words it utters do not say what they mean, they are equivocal, not at all in the sense of dissimulation, equivocal on the contrary because interchangeable, the dirty little ambivalence, the master becoming the servant and thereby becom­ ing or rebecoming the true master, the militant doing away with himself as the boss (or even as the little soldier of the revolution) and thereby remaining the true boss, the words from the mouth turned humbly towards the sun were already the words of the power to come, sent out om the tribunal, because they belong to knowl­ edge, the new revolution began again before turning sour like its predecessors, should its new servants play its spokesmen.

Hatred for the fac-simile. What does it matter what you say if the position of discourse remains the same? (Within the group, only Philippe Guillaume understood that early on.) 

To restart the revolution is not to re-begin it, it is to cease to see the world alienated, men to be saved or helped, or even to be served, it is to abandon the masculine position, to listen to femininity, stupidity and madness without regarding them as evils. Hatred for the pimp who disguises himself as a girl without having the desire to be one, sinister masculine caricature of the nobleman in drag.

End of the outburst