Re: Physicists Take Philosophers to Task in Paris (N.Y. Times)

["Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 6 Oct 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Well I am actually pretty familiar with that literature, and not just the
> classic stuff on Oedipal neuroses, but the pre-oedipal/narcissistic stuff
> too. (One of my prized possessions is a Standard Edition of the complete
> Freud. <snip>
> And I still found AO preposterously obscure. I think they wrote
> it while on LSD (and I'm only partly joking there).

Doug: You'll get no argument from me over the obscurity of much of
Anti-Oedipus. It pissed me off when I read it and reinforce my general
anglo-saxon ire at continental philosophers who seem to via to see who can
be the most opaque. However, much of what is difficult in the text comes
from two sources: first, they have taken over some of Artaud's language
and concepts such as the "body without organs" (who could get away with it
more easily as a poet) and second, they were trying to find new ways of
talking about both old and new subjects --which is always risky and often
harder for others to follow than for them to come up with new concepts and
words. So you've got these two guys, one a philosopher, whose own
treatises on Spinosa, Nietsche have their own difficulties, the other
steeped in a backlash against mainstream psychiatry which has sought to
turn much of it upsidedown, mix them together and you get some pretty
difficult texts. I'm not apologizing for it, or excusing it, just saying
that I feel like some of the effort of working through it pays off in
useful stuff. (PS: I also don't try to excuse Marx's crafting of Chapter 1
of Volume 1 of Capital either; it was a bad idea to structure it along the
lines of Hegel's logic, no matter how neatly it all fit together. It has
remained impenetrable or misleading for most Marxists since! But in that
case too, I think a lot of work figuring out how to put flesh on the
painfully bare bones of the analysis revealed a semantically meaningful
and politically useful interpretation, e.g., Reading Capital Politically.
IMHO)

>
> >In the end I found Anti-Oedipus limited by, among other things, a taking
> >over of rather primitive Marxist analysis, a la Baran & Sweezy.
>
> What do you find primitive about B&S?
>
> Doug
>
Doug: B&S's interpretation of Marx's value theory was all too orthodox (in
Sweezy's book) and effectively sterilized it (as usual) so with a dose of
Frankfurt School influence (Baran) the two of them wound up rewording
Keynesian economics in Marxist terms and offered us a one-sided theory of
capitalist power and irrationality that provided no point of departure for
understanding our own power, both to rupture capitalist development and to
move in new directions. As far as I can remember they both considered
themselves to be dialectical and historical materialists --theories which
have kept their practitioners trapped within the neverending synthesis of
capital's master narrative (as some pomo people might say). They
apologized for Stalin, then for Mao (another Stalinist) throughout the 50s
and 60s while being almost totally blind, deaf and dumb to the struggles
of American industrial workers. If I remember right in the whole decade of
the 50s there is only one article in Monthly Review on such struggles.
I don't know if "primitive" is the best word for this kind of work, but it
was the one that came to mind. D&G's work which shifts our attention from
domination to desire (and studies the former in terms of constraints on
the latter) evokes, for me, the centrality of living labor (one form of
human self activity) in Marx's own work, but is broader and evocative of
more diverse meanings of self-activity. THAT moves us away from the
productivist interpretation of Marx (despite their prediliction for
talking about desiring-machines and production).

You know, like everyone else, I was delighted to have their stuff back in
the 60s, it helped in denouncing capitalist excesses. It was only when I
wanted to answer Lenin's question of what is to be done, and realized that
it could only be answered fruitfully on the basis of understanding what
kind of power we already had, that I realized that they had virtually
nothing to offer in the way of conceptual tools to generate such an
understanding. Oh, well, back I went to Marx and found a different guy
than the one they told us about.

Harry


.............................................................................
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA
Phone Numbers: (hm)  (512) 478-8427
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E-mail: hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Accion Zapatista homepage:
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