so i was asked what deleuze ideas specifically i’ve found to be useful in a political setting, and i’d say the most immediate one is over identity. it’s from deleuze that we derive an elegant formulation of identity in late capitalist/post-industrial/whateveryouwanttocallit societies, that identity is the simplification and reduction of inner complexities for the sake of social convention.
the process by which we simplify our Selves and what guides the social conventions at whose whims we reduce our Selves are of course matters of power. If your dad demands you behave such and such way to be acknowledged as his son, if your boss demands you behave such and such way to remain employed, if a medical form requires you “be” such and such way to get the treatment you need - all these Selves you present will be different from a lover who expects other behaviors from you, a waitress whose expected to behave differently before you. in short, he gave greater dimension to when nietzsche identified the Western subject as a sad splintered one bereft of meaning and looking for its reflection everywhere.
y’all know how we tag everything as “me” or “same” or joke that “i’m [random object]”?
So the buzzfeed founder wrote his senior thesis on Deleuze and Baudrillard, in which he outlines these ideas, and which he used to found buzzfeed. Deleuze (and Guattari, i should emphasize) expounded the late capitalist subject and how its desire is channeled to produce the worker-consumer. everything you consume that you think you enjoy is really just labor: every quiz you take, every article you read, every thing you “Like” isn’t you “enjoying” and consuming, it’s you performing labor for Buzzfeed etc. Jonah Peretti wrote through Deleuze that because of MTV and 24 hour channels (which were new in the early 90s when he wrote) were sharpening the patterns that Deleuze and Nietzsche wrote on, a pattern Peretti turned up to 11 with Buzzfeed. Peretti noted how the late capitalist subject is bombarded with images we can be trained to consume and identify with.
now deleuze has also been used in other unsavory ways, like the IDF’s use of deleuze in urban guerilla tactics against palestinians. but i think that’s a symptom of the academy rewarding the ambitious and power hungry, since deleuze’s chapter on Faciality is probably my favorite since it gives the best exposition of every power relation in all their dynamism such he sees past each specific formulation of say white supremacy as it has been expressed throughout the eras and collapses them all into its most simple logic:
The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typical European [. …]
Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavours to integrate increasingly nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves[. …] From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be. The dividing line is not between inside and outside but rather is internal to simultaneous signifying chains and successive subjective choices. Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow themselves at a given degree of divergence). Its cruelty is equalled only by its incompetence and naïveté.
this applies to any ism and slots any and all reactions to these isms, both by the powerful and the oppressed.
think how some PoC will choose to respond to racism by saying stuff like, “oh i don’t see race” or “my race doesn’t define me” or when women say stuff like, “i’m not one of the girls, all the guys like me” or basically anyone who tokenizes themselves for a White Dude audience and read, “ The dividing line is not between inside and outside but rather is internal to simultaneous signifying chains and successive subjective choices. Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow themselves at a given degree of divergence)”
or consider how white people for instance just cannot conceive that PoC can think for themselves, like how libs keep trying to portray communism as a white people thing, that either we don’t exist or if we do, we’re being tricked. We’re expected to make the “right choices” so as to become the tractable minority token, and if we don’t, there are PoC or women minions to threaten us to vote for clinton or we deserve trump, and failing them, well trump is here to obliterate the uppity for daring to resist conformity.
i’ve gone on way too long, but these are some of the ways that deleuze has helped me understand the political situation, and it probably doesn’t make much sense since i can’t get into the whole gist of it and don’t feel like being indiscrete about specific things I’ve done IRL that are “deleuzian” or whatever.
2087
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