Q: Messieurs, what
do you make of Trump’s popularity this election season?
A: The masses are
not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they
wanted fascism, and it is this
perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.
Q: You do accuse
Trump of fascism, then?
A: Democracy, fascism,
or socialism, which of these is not haunted by the Urstaat as a model without
equal?
Q: The
Urstaat? I’m sorry, are you saying that some
kind of primitive state model informs all instances of civilized, political
organization?
A: The historian says
no, the Modern state, its bureaucracy and its technocracy, do not resemble the
ancient despotic state. Of course not,
since it is a matter in one case of reterritorializing decoded flows, but in
the other case of overcoding the territorial flows. The paradox is that capitalism makes use of
the Urstaat for effecting its reterritorializations. But the imperturbable modern axiomatic, from
the depths of its immanence, reproduces the transcendence of the Urstaat as its
internalized limit, or one of the poles between which it is determined to
oscillate.
Q: I’m afraid this
is all highly abstract and theoretical – can you give us a more concrete
example?
A: Archaeology
discovers it everywhere, often lost in oblivion, at the horizon of all systems
or States – not only in Asia, but also in Africa, America, Greece, Rome. Immemorial Urstaat, dating as far back as Neolithic times, and perhaps farther
still. Has not America acted as an
intermediary here? For it proceeds both
by internal exterminations and liquidations (not only the Indians but also the
farmers, etc.), and by successive waves of immigration from the outside.
Q: You mention
immigration. What do you make of the
racial prejudice that seems to permeate Trump’s campaign, his positions as well
as his voter base?
A: There is a segregative use of the conjunctive
syntheses of the unconscious, a use that does not coincide with divisions
between classes, although it is an incomparable weapon in the service of a
dominating class: it is this use that brings about the feeling of “indeed being
one of us,” of being part of a superior race threatened by enemies from
outside. Thus the Little White Pioneers’
son, the Irish Protestant who commemorates the victory of his ancestors, the
fascist who belongs to the master race.
Q: Do you think
that this racist persuasion constitutes a majority in the United States?
A: A minority can
be small in number; but it can also be the largest in number, constitute an
absolute, indefinite majority. That is
the situation when authors, even those supposedly on the Left, repeat the great
capitalist warning cry: in twenty years, “whites” will form only 12 percent of
the world population… Thus they are not
content to say that the majority will change, or has already changed, but say
that it is impinged upon by a nondenumerable and proliferating minority that
threatens to destroy the very concept of majority, in other words, the majority
as an axiom.
Q: It would seem
that there is a strong paranoiac element here, yes?
A: The despot is
the paranoiac: there is no longer any reason to forego such a statement, once
one has freed oneself from the characteristic familialism of the concept of
paranoia in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and provided one sees in paranoia a
type of investment of a social formation.
Q: You mention a
familial aspect of paranoia. Do you have
any thoughts on Trump’s comments about his daughter, Ivanka?
A: The despotic
signifier aims at the reconstitution of the full body of the intense earth that
the primitive machine had repressed, but on new foundations or under new
conditions present in the deterritorialized full body of the despot himself. This is the reason that incest changes its
meaning or locus, and becomes the repressing representation. For what is at stake in the overcoding
effected by incest is the following: that all the organs of all the subjects,
all the eyes, all the mouths, all the penises, all the vaginas, all the ears,
and all the anuses become attached to the full body of the despot, as though to
the peacock’s tail of a royal train, and that they have in this body their own
intensive representatives. Royal incest
is inseparable from the intense multiplication of organs and their inscription
on the new full body.
Q: I see. And what of his comments toward women in
general?
A: The truth is
that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge
administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the
bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on.
Q:
Fascinating. So, there is an aspect of
national desire, or investment, so to speak, that produces impressions of
familial, or racial, or national belonging, and these identities tend to serve
the purposes of the dominant class. How
does this occur, exactly? Is it an
ideological problem? And does this
phenomenon respond somehow to the contradictory demands of fascism?
A: It is not a
question of ideology. There is an
unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does
not necessarily coincide, with the preconscious investments, or with what the
preconscious investments “ought to be.”
That is why, when subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly
counter to their class interests – when they rally to the interests and ideals
of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat – it
is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not an ideological problem, a problem
of failing to recognize, or of being subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure.
Q: You’re
suggesting that the State is not merely a product of false ideologies or
deceptive machinations, but of desire itself.
So desire produces the state, but what produces desire?
A: The fact remains
that the apparent objective movement of capital – which is by no means a
failure to recognize or an illusion of consciousness – shows that the
productive essence of capitalism can itself function only in this necessarily
monetary or commodity form that controls it, and whose flows and relations
between flows contain the secret of the investment of desire. It is at the level of flows, the monetary
flows included, and not at the level of ideology, that the integration of
desire is achieved.
Q: Let’s talk more
about capitalism. Many leftists today
still champion the end of capitalism, yet the twentieth century witnessed a
slew of socialist states, many of which are counted today as failures. What is your position on this?
A: In comparison to
the capitalist State, the socialist states are children – but children who
learned something from their father concerning the axiomatizing role of the
State. But the socialist states have
more trouble stopping the unexpected flow leakage except by violence.
Q: Critics often
appeal to the totalitarian tendencies and economic disparities of socialist
countries as evidence for socialism’s inadequacy as an economic system. Is this a fair assessment?
A: To the extent
that capitalism constitutes an axiomatic (production for the market), all
States and all social formations tend to become isomorphic in their capacity as models of realization: there is but
one centered world market, the capitalist one, in which even the so-called
socialist countries participate.
Q: You identify
capitalism as an axiomatic. If I
understand you correctly, you seem to suggest that capitalism is coeval with
some kind of determining precedent or dictate.
Is there any hope of combating such a precedent, or is it a condition of
material processes?
A: The power of
minority, of particularity, finds its figure or its universal consciousness in
the proletariat. But as long as the
working class defines itself by an acquired status, or even by a theoretically
conquered State, it appears only as “capital,” a part of capital (variable
capital), and does not leave the plan(e)
of capital. At best, the plan(e)
becomes bureaucratic. On the other hand,
it is by leaving the plan(e) of capital, and never ceasing to leave it, that a
mass becomes increasingly revolutionary and destroys the dominant equilibrium
of the denumerable sets. It is hard to
see what an Amazon-State would be, a women’s State, or a State of erratic
workers, a State of the “refusal” of work.
If minorities do not constitute viable States culturally, politically,
economically, it is because the State-form is not appropriate to them, nor the
axiomatic of capital, nor the corresponding culture.
If the two solutions of
extermination and integration hardly seem possible, it is due to the deepest
law of capitalism: it continually sets and then repels its own limits, but in
doing so gives rise to numerous flows in all directions that escape its
axiomatic.
Q: Messieurs, thank
you so much for your time.
A: Thank you. And for those wary of Clinton, remember this:
perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough,
from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic
character. Not to withdraw from the
process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it:
in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.
*All interview
“answers” are drawn directly, or closely adapted, from Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia books: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
