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subjectivity (new relations with the body, with time, sexuality, the immediate surroundings, with
culture, work).
When a social mutation appears, it is not enough to draw the consequences or effects according to
lines of economic or political causality. Society must be capable of forming collective agencies of
enunciation that match the new subjectivity, in such a way that it desires its own mutation. It's a
veritable redeployment. The American New Deal and the Japanese boom corresponded to two
very different examples of subjective redeployment, into all sorts of ambiguities and even
reactionary structures. But they produced enough initiative and creativity to conceive new social
states capable of responding to the demands of the event. Following '68 in France, on the contrary,
the authorities never stopped living with the idea that "things will settle down." And indeed, things
did settle down, but under catastrophic conditions. May '68 was neither the result of, nor a reaction
to a crisis. It is rather the opposite. It is the current crisis in France, the impasse that stems directly
from the inability of French society to assimilate May '68. French society has shown a radical
incapacity to create a subjective redeployment on the collective level, which is what '68 demands.
In this light, how could it now trigger an economic redeployment that would ever satisfy the
expectations of the "left"? French society never came up with anything for the people: nothing at
school, nothing at work. Everything that was new was marginalized or reduced into caricature.
Today we see the population of Longwy cling to their steel, the dairy farmers to their cows, etc.
What else can they do? Every collective enunciation by a new existence, by a new collective
subjectivity, was crushed in advance by the reaction against '68, on the left almost as much as on
the right. Even by the "free radio stations." Each time it appeared, the possible was closed off.
The children of May '68, you can run into them all over the place, even if they are not aware of who
they are. Each country produces them in its own way. Their situation isn't so great. These are not
young executives. These are strangely indifferent, and for this very reason are in the right frame of
mind. They have stopped being demanding and narcissistic, but they know perfectly well that
nothing today corresponds to their subjectivity, to their potential of energy. They even know that all
current reforms are rather directed against them. They are determined to mind to their own
business as much as they can. They hold it open, hang on to something possible. It is Coppola
who created their poetized portrait in Rusty James. The actor Mickey Rourke explained: "The
character is at the end of his rope, on the edge. He's not the Hell's Angel type. He's got brains and
he's got good sense. But he hasn't got any university degree. And it is this combination that makes
him go crazy. He knows that there's no job for him because he is smarter than any guy willing to
hire him" (Liberation, February 15, 1984).
This is true of the entire world. What we institutionalize for the unemployed, the retired, or in
school, are controlled "situations of abandonment." For these, the handicapped is the model. The
only subjective redeployments actually occurring collectively are those of an unbridled American-
style capitalism, of a Muslim fundamentalism like in Iran, or of Afro-American religion like in Brazil:
the reversed figures of a new orthodoxy (one should add European neo-Papism to the list). Europe
has nothing to suggest, and France seems no longer to have any other ambition than to assume
the leadership of an Americanized and over-armed Europe that would impose the necessary
economic redeployment from above. But the field of the possible lives elsewhere. Along the East-
West axis, in pacifism, insofar as it intends to break up not only relations of conflict and over-
armament, but also of complicity and distribution between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Along the North-South axis, in a new internationalism that no longer relies solely on an alliance
with the third-world, but on the phenomena of third worldification in the rich countries themselves
(the evolution of metropolises, the decline of the inner-cities, the rise of a European third-world, as
Paul Virilio has theorized them). There can only be creative solutions. These are the creative
redeployments that can contribute to a resolution of the current crisis and that can take over where
a generalized May '68, amplified bifurcation or fluctuation, left off.
Translated by Robert Hardwick Weston
Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium
Deleuze and Guattari
Gilles Deleuze: Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]