The Masochistic Quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Deleuze and Guattari to Transversal Poetics with(out) Baudrillard

Abstract

Jean-Jacques Rousseau sweated, urinated, defecated, and ejaculated. He produced and reproduced. According to the “schizoanalytic” theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, he was a desiring-machine, an autonomic process of production and more production that works, breaks down, and immediately starts up again. But we are inclined to postpone discussion of Rousseau’s production until after inspecting the factories. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire acts independently of, and from, social and economic demands: it is both subject and object of desire; it is processes of desiring-production, and not acquisition, creativity, or lack. One cannot define desire against something outside of its self-reactive system, for such a formulation would irrevocably subject desire to an internal-external organizational dualism. Although desiring-production functions in continual interaction with and contrary to forces of attraction and repulsion, it is constituted neither by an impulsive naturalism nor by a compulsive constructionism. Desiring-production is not directed toward a specific purpose predicated upon a natural organization of the cosmos; rather, it strives for intensive singular states. The ongoing production of desire, itself the constituting expression of desire, is machinically enabled through couplings, the bringing apart and together of more forces in the formation of assemblages, whether experienced positively and/or negatively.

It is pointless to insist on their [today’s theories’] coherence with some “reality,” whatever that might be. The system has removed every secure reference from theory as it has from any other labour power. Theory no longer has any use-value, the theoretical mirror of production has also cracked. So much the better. What I mean is that the very undecidability of theory is an effect of the code. Let there be no illusions: there is no schizophrenic “drift” about this flotation of theories, where flows pass freely over the body without organs (of what, capital?). It merely signifies that any theory can from now on be exchanged against any other according to variable exchange rates, but without any longer being invested anywhere, unless it is the mirror of their writing.

Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (44)