As I enter into this immersion into Buchanan’s reader guide to The Anti-Oedipus, I find myself immediately conflicted -not about Buchanan but D & G’s approach to social justice. And no doubt, this comes out of a conflict I find my own process in: that constant vacillation between the abstract and the concrete, the theoretical and the practical.
(And in my defense, I can’t help but feel that Buchanan works in a similar place since as he begins to dip us into the more abstract aspects of D & G’s theory (that is by starting with the concrete issues of the environment D & G were working in: mainly the May 68 rebellion in France (he actually refers to thinkers that are working in the more concrete and practical realm such as Naomi Klein.)
And no doubt this conflict will haunt this present immersion in the book.
I would start by saying that I am perfectly sympathetic with D & G’s agenda: to focus more on a revolution of sensibility than on reform: that is reform being a matter of obtaining the power to institute those policies that will facilitate it. And this recognition could not be more prescient than in America today. There is just so much about its embrace of Capitalism (and I, living in Nebraska, get a daily front seat to this slow motion train wreck (that can’t simply be legislated away. For instance, if one were to buy into about 80% of the TV ads we see today (as well as some of the content of the shows we are watching in between (one might come to believe that they were living in some kind of golden age thanks to producer/consumer Capitalism. And it is the true believers who live in the paranoid/fascist center of having to protect this golden age that others are a threat to. Hence, for instance, Trump’s popularity: the very expression of America’s fascist potential, it being a comparatively adolescent country that embraces the adolescent notion that unless we are number 1, the world will fall apart. We’re basically facing the same thing that every other Western industrialized nation has had to face: that of stepping down from above other countries and taking our place among them. And only a change in sensibility, that which the poetic approach (as compared to the scientific (is most qualified to do, can save us from it.
This is why, for instance, while I am philosophically aligned with Bernie Sanders, I think Hillary is the better/more practical nominee. I just don’t think America has the sensibility for Bernie. And let’s say Bernie did become president. All I see is an Orwellian staged event in which the Weimar Republic is repeated via corporate influence on government and the obstructionist tactics of a Republican legislature. And without a change in sensibility (as D & G advocate (too many Americans will be too willing to buy into the narrative of that staged event. Hence the import of poets and philosophy which leans towards the poetic side of the no man’s land between science and literature.
At the same time (from a practical/pragmatic perspective (we have to be careful of theoretical overkill –that which acts as antidote to theoretical laziness. For instance, much of what D & G are concerned with is the question Wilhelm Reich asked: what is it about people that seem to seek their own oppression? And theory can come up with some really impressive answers such as Sartre’s Bad Faith: the desire of being-for-itself to have the fullness of Being that being-in-itself has. But we have to ask if that is what people are really experiencing when they submit to power. And while we can agree that submission is about more than interest, we have to give some credibility to the answer offered by Malcolm X: the house slave whom the slave owner gave certain privileges so that anytime any of the slaves got uppity and wanted to do something about their situation, the house slave was right there telling them: oh no! you don’t want to do that; ain’t nothing you’re gonna find out there that is better than what you have here.