K Cap vs Deleuze Affs

Congratulations, youve done everything the neoliberal

institutions you fight against want. You struggle, you rupture,
you play the micropolitical game, and feed the systems of
oppression that give you a place to speak in the first place.
Sinnerbrink
Sinnerbrink 06Department of Philosophy @ Macquarie University (Robert, 2006, Parrhesia, No. 1,
Nomadology or Ideology? Zizeks Critique of Deleuze, rmf)
While this might strike one as a rather tendentious charge, given the explicit critique of capitalism in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Zizek is nonetheless pointing to a real deadlock facing the Deleuzo-Guattarian proponent of
affective micropolitics and virtual becomings. There are, I suggest, two related aspects of this deadlock, which is both theoretical and practical. The first is the internal theoretical problem that Zizek clearly identifies, namely the
dualism between Deleuze I (the ontology of the immanent but fissured One, recalling Badious critical response to Deleuze) and Deleuze II (the ontology of molecular becoming and desubjectified flows, which represents a concerted
retreat from the nature of radical subjectivity). Presumably, for Zizek, Deleuze Is ontology is more capable of thinking this radical subjectivity than is Deleuze IIs ontology, which represents a retreat from the abyss of negativity that
is immanent to subjectivity as negativity. Yet having rejected the conceptual-ontological framework that would have allowed a thinking of this radical subjectivity, subjectivity as radical negativity of the immanent One, Deleuze (and
Guattari) is forced to embrace the neoromantic figure of the dissolved nomadic subject, whose decoded flows and libidinal becomings would supposedly provide a radical political potential in the face of globalised capitalism. The
problem is that such a figure of desubjectified subjectivity is itself a figure of the concrete universality of global capitalism today. This brings us to the second aspect of this deadlock, the political deadlock inherent within
contemporary capitalism itself. For the latter has clearly mastered what Marcuse and the Frankfurt School called processes of repressive desublimation, the pseudo-emancipatory capture of libidinal energy by desire-driven

it is the
constitution of subjective experience,
processes of
individuation that globalised capitalism now aims to capture
and control
through
networks
that process and manipulate
consumer desire
This
occurs through
synchronisation of
subjective experience, the
mediated selection of stereotypical images and
affective responses that serve to bind libidinal energy for the purposes of enhanced
consumption and political ideological manipulation
consumer culture. Indeed, as Bernard Stiegler has recently argued,

phenomenological

individual and collective

, largely

cultural-technological

subjectively and collectively.

and virtual imaginaries

process

what Stiegler has called the

technologically

.20 Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari could be said to have a sympathetic relation to this

post-Frankfurt school, Stieglerian critique of the instrumentalising of subjective experience through the synergy between consumer culture and global techno-capitalism. Indeed, Brian Massumi puts this challenge facing the

Capitalism
hijacks affect in order to intensify profit
The capitalist logic
take over
the ethical field of resistance to identity and
predictable paths.
theres
a
convergence between the
dynamic of capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance
capitalism
overdetermines all alternative formations as well
as all non-economic strata of social life
this does not imply
figures of nomadic subjectivity, molecular becomings, or affective politics
provide the viable strategies of resistance
contemporary global
capitalism thrives on the deterritorialising dynamic
DeleuzoGuattarians, sees as providing a vital source of micropolitical resistance to
the global system
the appropriation of molecular becoming,
impersonal affectivity, and Deleuzian tropes into the dynamics of global capitalism
at level of the processing and management of subjective experience through the
virtual vectors of media, marketing, and informational flows means that we can no
longer appeal to these tropes as part of any neo-romantic anti-capitalist critique
,
Deleuzian critic of global capitalismnamely the hijacking of affect for the purposes of consumption and profitabilityvery well:
surplus-value. It

starts intensifying or diversifying affect, but only in order to extract

potential. It literally valorises affect.

production starts to

of surplus-value

the relational field that is also the domain of political ecology,

Its very troubling and confusing, because it seems to me that

been

kind of

.21 For Zizek,

is the all-encompassing

concrete universal of our historical epoch, which means that, while it is a particular formation, it

(OwB, 185). But

, contra Deleuze and Guattari, that the Deleuzo-

Guattarian

only

against the established global order. As Zizek points out, contemporary neo-liberal economics is very far from

being, as Naomi Klein asserts, biased at every level towards centralization, consolidation, homogenisation. a war waged against diversity22 (OwB, 185). On the contrary,
very

that Klein, along with some contemporary

. For Zizek, the important lesson here is that

other

. Far from

presenting a marginalised or resistant mode of subjectivity

Deleuzian dissolved nomadic subjectivity presents a neat ideological fit with the deterritorialised fluxes of global capitalism. Rather than celebrate bodily becomings,

impersonal affects, and presubjective intensities as sources of theoretical and practical resistance, Zizek thus urges us to renounce the very notion of erratic affective productivity as the libidinal support of revolutionary activity
(OwB, 185).

AND Their position necessarily begs the question what would

happen if we ran out of things to resist? Where would we get
our fun? Resisting ideology through ideology guarantees that
there will always be more to do, thus we can make an infinite
number of changes at the symbolic level without ever
disrupting the fundamental fantasy that makes it function,
perpetuating and producing new violence. Dean
Dean, 06 (Jodi Dean is a professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith
Colleges.[1] She has also held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of
Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam Zizek and politics 2006 p28-29)
We can compare this scene from Glengarrv Glen Ross to President George W.[In] Bushs 2003 State of the Union address. In reporting on progress in the so-called war on terror, Bush lists some of those we have arrcsted or otherwise
dealt with, speci fying some key commanders of Al Qaida. He continues, All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Lets put it this way: They
are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies. I shuddered when I saw this speech. It has stuck with me, particularly because of Bushs repulsive smirk. For me, it was not simply a matter of what I took to be
Bushs clear allusion to torture. Rather, it was the fact that he enjoyed it. His clear enjoyment when mentioning torture and death made the speech compelling and unbearablehorrifyi ng and unavoidable. Does it make sense to
consider Bushs speech in terms of dis placed enjoyment? A perhaps obvious reading would emphasize some viewers transference of a desire for revenge onto the President. He offers himself as an instrument of our will and we

displacing our enjoyment

enables us to avoid confronting it, to avoid acknowledging an illegality
within law we endorse He acts, so we remain passive.
not everyone
agrees
Yet we are transfixed
by our own disavowed
passivity.
enables me to be
horrified
while denying
I am
unable actually to change a thing
politics involves a shift perspective on precisely this trap turning of what
appears to be impossibility into possibility that things might be
otherwise, but a turn cannot occur in absence of a refusal to
acknowledge our underlying passivity
. I can criticize
even as my true, passive position is caught in enjoyment,
trapped by this is so horrible, but its out of my hands
want him to carry it out, to act in our stead, to do those illegal and murderous deeds because we cannoteven though we want to. In this instance,

the speech

that

with Bush.

still

Bushs speech

the way that

over to Bush

that

To be sure,

self-righteously

, to write letters to the editor, talk with friends and colleagues, and send money to Move On, all

nonetheless trapped,

. And, perhaps, here Bartleby

in

an

who heard

wherein lies our enjoyment? Perhaps we are captured

,a

the

t hat

the

. I can imagine Republicans thrilled by the speech, but it is very difficult for me to imagine Democrats and

progressives taking the difficult steps of organizing politically to impeach Bush, stop the war, and publicly recant previous support for the war by admitting they were wrong

the speech, and

the policies and the man behind it,

Oh,

, not my responsibility55 In sum. as with the Baldwin

example, the enjoyment in the Bush speech is double: viewers transfer their enjoyment to Bush, remaining passive while he acts for them; or we pursue all sorts of activity, talking and criticizing, disavowing the fact that these
activities are ineffectuaL56 We are transfixed, then, by the impossibility of the situation, by the way we are compelled to confront and disavow in the same moment the horrific fact of the law violating the law jr us and in our stead.
Those of us who oppose Bush and his war are compelled to confront and disavow in the same moment our own failure to act, our own sense of helpless entrapment. BEGIN FOOTNOTE Compare with 2ileks discussions of liberal
intellectual fascination with nationalism: they refuse it. mock it. laugh at it, yet at the same time stare at it with powerless fascination. The intellectual pleasure procured by denouncing nationalism is uncannily close to the
satisfaction of successfully explaining ones own impotence and failure: Tarrying with the Negative. p. 211. Hence. zizek holds the view that the threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to be active, to
participate. to mask the Nothingness of what goes on: Parallax View. p. 334.

The alternative is to give up the resistance of the 1AC. When

we sacrifice our precious resistance it loses its capacity to
fascinate us like a pair of finger cuffs, the moment you stop
fighting you can be free to create true political change. This is
a pre-requisite for any true liberatory action. Zizek
Zizek, 06 (Slavoj iek is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher and cultural critic. He is currently a senior
researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana in Slovenia The
Parallax view, 332-340 )

How,

, do we find a way out of this deadlock?

then

Balibar ends with an ambiguous reference to Mahatma Gandhi. It is true that Gandhis formula Be

yourself the change you would like to see in the world encapsulates perfectly the basic attitude of emancipatory change: do not wait for the objective process to generate the expected/desired change, since if you just wait for it,
it will never come; instead, throw yourself into it, be this change, take the risk of enacting it directly upon yourself. Is not the ultimate limitation of Gandhis strategy,however, that it works only against a liberaldemocratic regime
which abides by certain minimal ethico-political standardsin which, to put it in emotive terms, those in power still have a conscience? Recall Gandhis reply, in the late s, to the question of what the Jews in Germany
should do against Hitler: they should commit mass suicide, and thus arouse the conscience of the world. . . .We can easily imagine the Nazi reaction to this: OK, well help you where do you want the poison delivered to? There is
another way, however, in which Balibars plea for renouncing violence can be given a specific twistthat of what I am tempted to call Bartleby politics. Recall the two symmetrically opposed modes of the living dead, of finding
oneself in the uncanny place between the two deaths: one is either biologically dead while symbolically alive (surviving ones biological death as a spectral apparition or symbolic authority of the Name), or symbolically dead while
biologically alive (those who are excluded from the sociosymbolic order, from Antigone to todays Homo sacer). And what if we apply the same logic to the opposition of violence and nonviolence, identifying two modes of their

We all know the pop-psychological notion of passive-aggressive behavior,

a housewife who, instead of actively opposing her husband, passively sabotages
we should assert this
passive aggression as a
political gesture, in contrast to aggressive passivity
participation in
socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time
to make sure that
nothing will happen,
the first truly critical
violent) step is
intersection?22

usually

applied to

him. And this brings us back to where we began: perhaps

attitude of

proper radical

, the standard interpassive mode of our

in order

that nothing will really change. In such a constellation,

(aggressive,

to withdraw into passivity, to refuse to participate

is the necessary first
step which
clears the ground
for true activity, for an act that will
actually change
the constellation.
Bartlebys I would prefer not to

, as it were,

, opens up the place,

the coordinates of

the obscene How does the counterpoint to Bartleby politics, the impotent passage lacte, look today? A

classic Hollywood action film is always a good illustration.Toward the end of Andrew Daviss The Fugitive, the innocent-persecuted doctor (Harrison Ford) confronts at a large medical convention his colleague (Jeroem Kraabe),
accusing him of falsifying medical data on behalf of a large pharmaceutical company.At this precise point, when we would expect a shift to the companycorporate capitalas the real culprit, Kraabe interrupts his talk, invites Ford to
step aside, and then, outside the convention hall, they engage in a passionate violent fight, beating one another until their faces are streaming with blood.The openly ridiculous character of this scene is revealingit is as if, in order

to get out of the ideological mess of playing with anticapitalism, one has to
opens
cracks in the narrative for all to see.
directly

up the

make a move which

Another aspect here is the transformation of the bad guy into a vicious,

sneering, pathological character, as if psychological depravity (which accompanies the dazzling spectacle of the fight) should replace the anonymous nonpsychological drive of capital: the much more appropriate gesture would have
been to present the corrupt colleague as a psychologically sincere and privately honest doctor who, because of the financial difficulties of the hospital in which he works, was lured into swallowing the pharmaceutical companys bait.
Thus The Fugitive provides a clear instance of the violent passage lacte serving as a lure, a vehicle of ideological displacement. A step further from this zero-level of violence is taken in Paul Schraders and Martin Scorseses Taxi
Driver, in the final outburst of Travis (Robert de Niro) against the pimps who control the young girl he wants to save (Jodie Foster). The implicitly suicidal dimension of this passage lacte is crucial: when Travis prepares for his
attack, he practices drawing the gun in front of a mirror; in what became the best-known scene in the film, he addresses his own image in the mirror with the aggressive-condescending You talkin to me? In a textbook illustration of
Lacans notion of the mirror stage, the aggression here is clearly aimed at oneself, at ones own mirror-image.This suicidal dimension reemerges at the end of the slaughter scene when Travis, heavily wounded and leaning against
the wall, mimics with the forefinger of his right hand a gun aimed at his bloodstained forehead and mockingly triggers it, as if saying: The real aim of my outburst was myself. The paradox of Travis is that he perceives himself as
part of the degenerate dirt of the city life he wants to eradicate, so thatas Brecht put it apropos of revolutionary violence in The Measure Takenhe wants to be the last piece of dirt with whose removal the room will be clean. Far
from indicating an imperialist arrogance, such irrational outbursts of violence one of the key topics of American culture and ideologystand, rather, for an implicit admission of impotence: their very violence, display of
destructive power, is to be conceived as the mode of appearance of its very oppositeif anything, they are exemplary cases of the impotent passage lacte. As such, these outbursts enable us to discern the hidden obverse of the
much-praised American individualism and self-reliance: the secret awareness that we are all helplessly thrown around by forces out of our control. There is a wonderful early short story by Patricia Highsmith, Button, about a
middle-class New Yorker who lives with his nine-year-old Downs syndrome son, who babbles meaningless sounds all the time and smiles, saliva running out of his open mouth; late one evening, unable to endure the situation any
longer, he decides to take a walk on the lonely Manhattan streets. Here he stumbles upon a destitute homeless beggar, who pleadingly extends his hand toward him; in an act of inexplicable fury, the hero beats the beggar to death
and tears a button off his jacket. Afterward, he returns home a changed man, enduring his family nightmare without any traumas, even capable of a kind smile at his handicapped son; he keeps the button in the pocket of his trousers
all the timea remainder that, once at least, he did strike back against his miserable destiny.

Links

Cyber
The cyber-capitalist movement has already reappropriated
DnG. Marks
Marks 06Reader in Critical Theory @ Nottingham Trent University (John, 2006, Deleuze and the
Contemporary World, Edinburgh University Press, Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual
and Cybernetics, rmf)
Finally, there is the issue of the links between cyberspace and advanced capitalism, given that many cyberspace enthusiasts also seem to embrace the free-market ethos of globalised neo-liberal capitalism. The most obvious
expression of this cybercapitalism is Wired magazine. The magazines executive editor, Kevin Kelly, for example, perceives a direct analogy between the use of cybernetic feedback loops to improve production and efficiency in the
post-war steel industry, and the neoliberal theories of Hayek and the Austrian school of economics (Kelly 1994: 1212). For Kelly, the emerging global network economy is rhizomatic, and should be thought of as a constantly
evolving, decentralised system that proliferates in a quasi-biological manner: As networks have permeated our world, the economy has come to resemble an ecology of organisms, interlinked and coevolving, constantly in flux,
deeply tangled, ever expanding at its edges. As we know from recent ecological studies, no balance exists in nature; rather, as evolution proceeds, there is perpetual disruption as new species replace old, as natural biomes shift in

Deleuze and Guattari have found

themselves co-opted into this alliance between cyberspace and
capitalism
it may well be justified to call Deleuze the
ideologist of late capitalism
Deleuze does not fully work through the
consequences of the spectral materialism that is entailed by the information
revolution, biogenetics and quantum physics
Deleuze
may in some ways be seen to endorse the Gnostic fantasies of cyberspace that are
such an important part of late digital capitalism
there is a procapitalist aspect,
in the work of Deleuze and Guattari themselves
There
is a close correlation
between Deleuzes Spinozist commitment to the
impersonal circulation of affects and the affective dynamics of late capitalism
Deleuze and Guattaris work is in
tune with the particular phase of
late
capitalism that has coincided with the recent growth of information and
computer technologies
the proto-capitalist aspect of
Deleuze and Guattaris work is developed
in
Netocracy
their makeup, and as organisms and environments transform each other (Kelly 1998: 108). In this way, then, in recent years,

cutting edge

. In his recent

assessment of Deleuzes work, Organs Without Bodies, Slavoj Zizek goes so far as to claim that

(Zizek 2004: 184).3 He implies that

(Zizek 2004: 25). He goes on to suggest that, particularly in his work with Guattari,

(Zizek 2004: 1847). In this way, Zizek suggests that

as he puts it,

(Zizek 2004: 193).

, he claims,

(Zizek 2004: 183

4). Others have also argued that

some ways in

or advanced

. Without going so far as to claim that such a tendency is inherent in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Richard Barbrook has drawn direct parallels between

Deleuzoguattarian Net enthusiasts and what he terms Californian hi-tech neo-liberalism (Barbrook 2001: 173). As far as Zizek is concerned,
most fully

the recent Swedish bestseller

, by Alexander Bard and Jan Sderqvist

(2002). Zizek is aware that Bard and Sderqvist claim that the netocratic society that is currently emerging is actually post-capitalist. For them, Deleuze, as a key inheritor of what they call the mobilistic tradition, offers ways of
grappling this new reality (Bard and Sderqvist 2002: 11011). This mobilistic, or eternalistic mode of thought is the only one that will help us to think through the consequences of the new netocratic society that is replacing

Just as capitalism replaced feudalism

informationalism is in the process of
replacing capitalism. The Internet has emerged as the definitive model of the new
social reality in which information and knowledge finally replace capital
the netocrats, todays lite, realize the dream
of yesterdays marginal philosophers and outcast artists
the thought of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, the ultimate philosophers of
resistance, of marginal positions crushed by the hegemonic power network, is
effectively the ideology of the newly emerging ruling class.
capitalism.

so, they claim,

. However, for Zizek, there is no

critical edge to Bard and Sderqvists use of Deleuze and Guattari: What they are actually claiming is that

(from Spinoza to Nietzsche and Deleuze). In short, and stated even more

pointedly,

(Bard and Sderqvist 2004: 193)

Flows
The AFFs understanding of difference through flows makes
resistance impossible and disguises our material reality.
Willatt
Willatt 08University of Essex (Edward, 2008, 11th International Graduate Conference in Philosophy:
Philosophy Post-1968, Thinking Difference through Flows: Deleuze and Guattari on the Immanence of
Desire to Society in Anti-Oedipus, rmf)
We have followed so far Deleuze and Guattari's attempts to think difference through flows but must now consider an objection to this whole approach towards thinking difference. In his book Organs without Bodies Slavoj iek makes

we cannot think difference through flows if difference is to have any social or

political value. In order to attain this, difference must secure the finitude and
abstraction of the subject
This ultimate
difference is symbolic castration.
the case that

. iek sees desiring-production as being an escape from the constitutive social difference that is the real object of desire.

It makes subjects finite and so establishes the problems of finitude as the condition of any political action. He writes critically that '...Deleuze

experienced his collaboration with Guattari as ... a relief: the fluidity of his texts cowritten with Guattari, the sense that now, finally, things run smoothly, is effectively a fake relief it signals that the burden of thinking was

Difference must constitute a challenge by making the subject finite

but it must also provide the abstraction that enables the subject to
rise above their material situation. Deleuze and Guattari's attempt to think
difference through flows is escapist
In criticising the picture of desiring-production that we have
been sketching
far from tying us down to our bodily reality, symbolic
castration sustains our very ability to transcend this reality and enter the space
of immaterial Becoming'.
a political subject is faced with the challenge of their
own finitude as well as being abstracted from the flows or drives that would
otherwise provide distraction or escape from political concerns.
successfully avoided.'

allowing politics to

arise as challenging and hazardous

for iek. He defends Oedipus as the structural way of organising social space or thinking the difference that expresses the

constitutive finitude and abstraction of the political subject.

, iek writes that '...

By definition

iek identifies Deleuze and Guattari's notion of matter

as the 'polymorphous perversity' of drives. He compares the activity of desiring-production to market relations in late capitalism, where experimentation with different lifestyles and positions leaves no 'empty space' where the

experimentation with difference

apes the traumatic
problems of finitude imposed by symbolic castration. How can the subject resist
capitalism
if it is the interceptor of the very flows that are harnessed by
capitalist social machines If everything is relative to flows
politics never gets
started
subject can question the order of society. His criticism is that

, being perverse, esc

, he asks,

then for iek