Deleuze & Air-Guitarri: Subpop of the 70s

[Dennis R Redmond]

Ah, the sublime joys of summer ideological mudwrestling. Well, if wrestle
we must, then we might as well do some rentier-bashing while we're at it.

I was never impressed with Deleuze and G., for the simple reason that,
like so many French theorists in the Seventies (and this includes
Derrida), they had no effective concept of a transnational mass culture.
They were OK as rousers of the rabble, but they completely misunderstood a
largely imported American media culture as being some kind of utopian
field of rhizomic possibilities. First it was power to the people, then it
was networking to the people, now it's the Internet to the people -- at
least, the people with the right credit history. Seventies media Maoism
merges seamlessly into Nineties Microsoftism. 

You could argue that postmodernism, in all its hallucinogenic splendor,
was neither more nor less than a collective attempt to prove one's
ideological credit history to a fundamentally bankrupt system (namely,
Anglo-American rentier capitalism, as opposed to those more efficient
systems of predation emerging in Europe and East Asia). The worse the
bankruptcy of actually degenerating neoliberalism, the greater the
intellectual collateral required to prove that the system is 
solvent (e.g. Fukayama's uproariously clueless "End of WhiteWesternMaleMan", 
where the whole of world history is leveraged off of a single
shoddily-built concept hastily cloned from the dregs of a Heritage
Foundation beer bust).

Lacan's Imaginary, Kristeva's semiosis, Derrida's tympan, even Foucault's
panopticon stand at the very beginning of this process: such concepts
were, in this sense, the intellectual versions of the Eurodollar market --
neo-national speculations, which picked up where the American Empire (or
at least its reigning pragmatisms) left off. What was quasi-radical 
in the Seventies became the repressive status quo of the Nineties: thus
the tendency of so many contemporary intellectuals to speculate on the
derivatives market of theory. Post-structuralism today is the Wall Street
of intellectuals who no longer have secure jobs at national universities. 

The dialectical flip side of this is that such thinkers can be interesting
in a symptomatic sense, i.e. Foucault's gay identity and the lesbian-gay
revolution he was symbolically aligned to; Kristeva's emigration from
Bulgaria to Paris, with all the Spivakian duplicities such a
crossing from periphery to metropole requires; Derrida's own trajectory
from marginalized Algerian Jew to international theory-star of
marginalization; Lacan's thespian strategy of cinematizing the
Freudian scenario, etc. If these theorists had anything
in common, it would be the attention they paid to micropolitics and a
(nascently) postnational culture, which Fredric Jameson would name,
famously, as the (silicon) logic of multinational capitalism. Ironically,
their very provinciality vis-a-vis the American Empire (English is the 
language of finance as well as theory) gave their theories
a pungently subversive and generally Left-leaning twist; none of these
thinkers can be considered even remotely neoliberal. If we were
charitable, we could say they were looking for a Green Party or a united 
front of the micropolitical movements in an era when ever more rightwing
Social Democrats seemed to be the only organized alternative to market
barbarism. I'm not so sure of this: I think the Seventies theorists, by
failing to deal adequately with transnational culture (reggae and hip hop,
Hong Kong video, etc.) were basically cultural conservatives who didn't
like the impending Americanization of Europe, and came up with alternative
models of solidarity mostly limited to intellectuals and media-workers
themselves.  Maybe that's too harsh. Maybe it's just that where Europe had
deconstruction (essentially, the deregulation of the concept of
dissemination), America had the pragmatic cultural deregulation wrought by
cable TV. 

To make a long harangue short, none of the canonic Seventies thinkers even
got close to the problem of how to fight multinational capital on
its own turf, or theorizing a vicious class struggle gone
irrevocably global: for that, you'd have to go to such unrepentant
Marxists as Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, the late, great Ernest Mandel, and of
course the inimitable J.P. Sartre (whom, like many an initially crusty
Mouton-Rothschild, just gets better and better as he ages). 

There. Enough ideological hydrocarbon to set Tokyo Bay alight. Anyone with
a lighter?

-- Dennis