[Deleuze's and Guattari's] Anti-Oedipus resonated for a new era whose radical spirit was bent on subverting hierarchies. But, just as the swinging sixties notion of the sexual revolution had concealed its opposite, namely the repressive desublimation Herbert Marcuse indicted in One-Dimensional Man, so Anti-Oedipus’s injunctions towards non-fascist living produced a cure worse than the disease; so, at least, argues psychoanalyst Rob Weatherill in The Anti-Oedipus Complex: Lacan, Critical Theory and Post-modernism.
Although preaching against the Oedipus complex, Deleuze and Guattari enmesh themselves deeper in it by gleefully slaying all forms of authority, tradition, morality and restraint, encouraging us to murder our patriarchal masters ecstatically, cheering our ‘liberation’ even as we remove the last bulwarks against the inhuman rapacity of the market, argues Weatherill. Instead of supporting, as Freud did, the basic matrix of marriage and family, they favour ‘free-wheeling individualistic modes of pleasure’.
...The desire that Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari prized was a disappearing act in which one loses one’s identity and merges into some collective--trippy crowds at a Grateful Dead gig, perhaps, or enragés at demonstrations in Paris or Tehran. Instead of resolving one’s Oedipal complex on the couch, and sublimating one’s incestuous desires into de-sexualised and thus socially acceptable activities, we should realise the revolutionary potential of desire. Libidinal flows were to be prized, hierarchies toppled, and the mad orgy of pleasure joined.
But is desire revolutionary? ... Deleuze and Guattari thought so: ‘It is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence--desire, not left-wing holidays!--and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.’
That jibe against ‘left-wing holidays’ makes it clear they thought proletarian struggle worth less than the ostensibly revolutionary potential of liberating desire. Deleuze and Guattari clearly cared little for collective norms as means of improving the workers’ lot. In this, these post-modern French theorists were not so different from the neoliberals who would, before the decade was over, take power in the White House and 10 Downing Street. A society devoted to self-gratification is easier to control. Such, at least, had Marcuse argued eight years before Anti-Oedipus was published, in One-Dimensional Man. His notion of repressive desublimation was used to argue that the countercultural liberation of Eros is readily co-opted by conservative forces.
His point was that the unleashing of untrammelled desire seemed to end repression, but only resulted in another, more sophisticated system of exploitation. Under fascism we may have desired our own domination for sado-masochistic reasons; under late capitalism, we supposed that sexual freedoms and consumer choice would free us, while, Marcuse argued, in reality these freedoms were really new means for us to desire our own domination.
...Deleuze and Guattari became, in effect, complicit with the system they ostensibly sought to destroy.
One corollary of Deleuze and Guattari’s eulogies to the revolutionary potential of desire was what has been called the happiness fantasy – a deluded pursuit of power, sexual conquest and money that, as often as not, is a male masturbatory fantasy. Indeed, the history of happiness since the war can be traced from Reich’s orgone accumulator through Marcuse’s repressive desublimation and Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines to Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation and Donald Trump. Deleuze and Guattari reckoned that desire would overturn the social order; more likely, its liberation, at least under neoliberal capitalism, has unleashed that order’s most rapacious, exploitative tendencies.
And yet Anti-Oedipus did serve as a radical manifesto for the post-modern era, not least in its subversion of identity. Consider the thynnine wasp one last time. Instead of being trapped in the prison-house of being, it was engaged in a flight of becoming, its identity fluid, its passion spent as it fertilised the orchid. In the post-modern era, such becoming was part of a gleefully godless liberation theology for which Deleuze and Guattari had proselytised. Gender was fluid, identities exchangeable – perhaps even the biologically determinate constraints of sex could be overcome. Instead of being doomed to be, one could become multiple. Instead of remaining what one was born as, one could become what one wanted--multiple, provisional, fluid. Identities became masks one could pick up in the marketplace, wear, and discard at will. In this way, desire exploded identity.
Stuart Jeffries, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere, pp. 45-46
Be careful what you wish for.
At some point when I have more time and have assimilated Jeffries arguments better, I want to dig into this more deeply. But for now let me say just this: In the popular political imagination the political left and the cultural left have become conflated, and as anybody who has been reading here knows, I align myself with the former, but in no way associate myself with the latter. The former is inspired by a transcendental ideal of Justice; the latter by a "godless liberation theology". The second is in opposition to and works consciously or unconsciously against the first. And the "progressivism" of the second has become too much associated in the American public's imagination the progressivism of the Democrats because of the party's capture by intellectual factions on the cultural Left who are more influenced by Guattari and Deleuze than by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This has given Progressivism a bad name among ordinary Americans.
Liberation, yes. But liberation from what? I would say from delusion and obsession, i.e., from objects of desire that are unworthy of our deepest aspirations. But in the godless, postmodern "theology" that pervades the cultural left, Liberation is framed as delivery from the Oedipus Complex and its repressive traditional social norms. The goal for this kind of "progressivism" is to live in an anti-Oedipal, normless society. Such a society might produce admirable postmodern cultural icons like Madonna and Lady Gaga, but it also has no ground to condemn figures like Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein who are the other side of the 'desire' coin.
By what moral standard within this postmodern liberation theology can we judge the first two admirable and the second two not? It just comes down to aesthetic preference. You can call Trump and Weinstein predators, but when they retort that "We're just following our transgressive desires; we don't believe in conventional, alienating, life-sapping norms. Who are you to judge us?" Well, what's your retort? It just comes down to your not agreeing, but by what standard can you claim that you're right and they're wrong? Why should anybody take you seriously? It just comes down to aribitrary opinions about what constitutes naughty or nice behaviors.
The better solution is to accept that norms are necessary, and they must be continuously but gradually improved. And the standard by which we measure such improvement is Justice understood as an inspiring transcendental ideal. You can't force better norms on a society because that only leads to backlash. You have to awaken dormant parts of the human soul. You have to inspire people to want not just to behave well but to become good, and you can't do that if you don't believe it's in most people to become that or you believe that Goodness and Justice are just arbitrary social constructions.
And the bottom line is that a majority of Americans are never going to accept your program because hardly anybody wants a Skinner's Box society, which is ultimately the only kind of society that would enable you to achieve your behaviorally correct goals.
By all means, let there be an avant-garde that explores reality beyond the fringes of what is conventionally acceptable, but let them remain on the fringes. The challenge for society inside the fringe is to develop norms that align with the Tao of things, that is, with Justice understood as a transcendental ideal. You have to believe that there is such a thing if there's any hope of bending the long arc of history toward it. And then you have to have the will to do the work that's necessary to achieve it.
Deleuze and Guattari, Trump and Weinstein believe in no such arcs and would argue anyone who does is naive. But while the first pair might not have had in mind the second as exemplars when they wrote Anti-Oedipus, they bear some responsibility for promoting the normless imaginary in which Trump, Weinstein, and the sociopathies associated with Neoliberalism thrive. And so do intellectuals on the cultural Left bear responsibility who accept such a liberation theology without understanding its perverse effects.
See also "How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left" I and II