There Is a Great Gulf Fixed

Criticism of Baudrillard is in short supply and this lecture reveals why. To the Deleuzians’ credit, they have kept quiet about it. To Deleuze’s credit, he confesses that he mostly does not get it. Nevertheless, something gets him.

https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/lecture/lecture-04-12/

The second difference is that Marxism supports a certain opposition between the economic infrastructure and the ideological, between the infrastructure as instance of production and ideology. For us, at no time did the problem of ideology arise, because we have a simple idea: it is not so much that ideology is in itself a deformation of something or transformation of something; it is not at all that ideology is, for example, a false consciousness; but that, literally, there is no ideology. It does not exist.

There is no ideology. There are only organizations of power; and what one calls ideologies are the statements of organizations of power. For example, there is no Christian ideology; there is on the other hand…fundamentally, Christianity, throughout its entire history, is not an organization of power of one particular type, but its history has been traversed by the invention of a multiplicity, of a variety of organizations of power, right up to the formation of the primary one, the idea of an international power; and what one calls Christian ideology, or the history of Christian ideology, is only the succession of statements corresponding to the organization of ecclesiastical power.

Despite the opening not explicitly pertaining to Baudrillard, and despite its surprising vulgarity (indistinguishable from Liberal anti-intellectualism, it could pass for an anti-Deleuze passage in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science), the blueprint is most relevant to the subsequent claims, but is perhaps difficult to see on account of being too simple and/or too stupid: although Power is explicitly condemned content-wise, Deleuze’s whole bibliography is nothing but an apology of Power, form-wise. What is “ecclesiastical power” but a synonym of “ideological power”? The shameless, indeed, category of ideology is only dispensed with for the purposes of even greater shamelessness, the claim that Power is, in this case, “ecclesiastical”. It is trivially easy to imagine Deleuze denying “ecclesiastical power” elsewhere, just as he denies “ideological power” here, until the whole range of “x power” is exhausted and “ideological power” is blamed again. Of course, this is exactly what Power is, and, unless one categorically denies the x and condemns Power as such, thus breaching Theology in general and Christian Theology in particular, one is thereby literally Philosophized BY Power. This blind spot is commonly described as ideology itself by Deleuze’s Continental peers, as impossibly Evil an irony as Deleuze’s Philosophical attraction to Power amounting to his inclusion in the x category — to a “Deleuze power”. His anti-Platonism and anti-Hegelianism, even, and especially, taken at face value, disclose this far better than actually reading his books (which I have not done, of course). Plato is perhaps the first Philosophical instance of a…Formal condemnation of Power, that Continentals accuse him of everything up to Fascism is absurd, not because they are wrong, but because they are far more right than they themselves are willing to admit, and that Plato himself proactively admits it at the most Formal level: those perplexed by the Platonic proximity of meditation on the “Good” and instructions on base actuality (commonly said to culminate in The Republic) are blinded by Power, the most “esoteric” Platonic insight is precisely the Formal desecration of Power, its continuous collapse into “content”, or rather, its undue appropriation of its own collapse, its ouroboric or “hyperreal” (or perhaps Deleuzian?) Creation of actual multiplicities as its Ontological throne; said proximity collapsed into continuity. Apropos of signifier-signified violation, actual ideological or ecclesiastical “reality” has no properties (neither does “reality” itself) past being a stupid token of distinction from the Power that does not even impose one semiosis over another, or even impose semiosis to begin with, rather, it disposes of the supposed distinction (a dispositif?), a “desemiosis” whereby it lets Deleuze et al. speak Power out of being — the Real MANDATES representation. Perhaps this is how “statements are produced”? What is implicit, Formally, in the Continental accusation that Plato “leads to” Fascism or that Fascism is “inscribed in” Plato is the reactionary return to the distinction between Power and something else (its apology). Whereas Plato discloses that this is a lie, that the theoretical acrobatics are performed by Power itself, they are the mocking mirror of the Ontological masquerade of Power. Perhaps this is the exegesis of the rhizome? Regardless, it is very fitting that Plato calls it the “Good” rather than the “Power”. The collapse into, or liberation of, multiplicity is the raison d’être of Power: it is not that Power justifies itself by punishing the “abnormal”, the “abject”, the “going astray”, etc., rather, just as the obscene is the main event of entertainment, said categories are vital to Power, and are fundamentally nothing but Power itself, which thereby proactively grants itself a “sufficient reason” (not to mention the elevation thereof to an Ontological principle, “History is a footnote to Plato”, indeed, Deleuzian apology is Catholic, and Pharisaic, apology) to exist, its otherwise abhorrent presence is sanctioned by said categories, by Power itself collapsing into or liberation itself as said deviantly (or deviously) powerless categories, “relative to which” Power appears as an indefinite menstruation with a mandate of Heaven, as always already solicitude — as Good. Let us take Catholicism to the end: if perfection is “missing something”, and can only be perfect through the fall, Evil is, indeed, “an absence of good” in that it can only be truly Evil through this — Platonic — good. Of course, closing the loop and coupling this good with the initial fall is a — Gnostic — nightmare, Evil itself. It is also an anagram of Hegel’s absolute knowing. As uncanny, and not so much contrary to but engulfing of the Deleuzian texts, as the Deleuzian total prostration before the reality principle and the symmetrical paleo-Marxist pretension to “esotericism” liberating each other into the Metaphysical frolic of a veritable “becoming laborer”.

What is this question of the production of statements? It is a relatively recent problem: three books in France pose, or else do not pose but revolve around, this question: how statements are produced, or what comes down to the same thing more concretely: how does one have done with old statements? How does one produce new statements? The three books are those of [Jean] Baudrillard, [Jean-Pierre] Faye and [Michel] Foucault. For Baudrillard, the examples of the production of statements are borrowed from aesthetics and in particular from a very concrete aesthetic involving the auction, the sale of paintings at an auction. In the case of Foucault, the great examples he gives of the production of statements concern above all madness, in the 19th century, the production of new statements concerning madness, such as it happens in the 19th century, and on the other hand, the constitutive statements of the medical clinic in the 19th century as well.

Unfortunately, the rest of the lecture does not really pertain to Baudrillard either. It pertains to Deleuze’s morbid fixation with the “production of statements”. What does this mean? Who knows? Moreover, who cares? The fact that Deleuze’s ideas are still museum pieces despite an army of academic clowns dedicated to sucking them dry, not to mention the fact that the only challenge they face is not the “counterrevolution of Power” but simply dying of boredom (apropos of Marxism, Communist apartment block design would be Philosophically preferable), all of this can only lead one to conclude that Baudrillard’s only mistake was being too charitable in Forget Foucault. The history, the academia, and the reality, most of all, that Deleuze spent his life worshiping has thrown him in the trash. Good riddance. However, this lecture still serves to show, first, the (fortunately) irreducible gulf between Baudrillard and Continental barbarism and, second, Baudrillard’s Gnosticism even in a text as academic as For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, before he “became Baudrillard”. The passages containing a certain phrase will provide more than enough.

From there, things get complicated, because Baudrillard’s third proposition is this: starting from exchange-value, a transmutation is produced. So here we are in a simple situation; someone is telling you that exchange-value is primary in relation to use-value, which can also mean: the exigencies of consumption are primary in relation to production, and in effect, at the level of the exigencies of consumption, there is already a handling of a distinctive material, of a differential material. Good. That implies an idea that it is necessary to retain for later, namely that the basis (I am not saying the form), the basis of capitalism is exchange-value. [Interruption of the recording]

… Baudrillard’s third thesis concerns, in a certain way, a veritable transmutation of exchange-value, and for him, as for us, that will be the essential, namely the way in which exchange-value will transform itself into what he will call sign exchange-value, or what he calls sign-value, or what he calls sign-form. That is going to be the crux of his problem, and I say to myself that it is also going to be ours, because how exchange-value … [Unfinished sentence] I’m not sure if it’s well posed, starting from exchange-value, because again: how does exchange-value transmute itself into sign-value, or sign-form — that’s another way of saying: how are statements produced in a system of exchange? How does the production of statements come about?

This phrase will incessantly repeat throughout the lecture while Deleuze himself gets, understandably, increasingly confused. Forget “pathological” reading (his peers are guilty of everything that they accuse the Jungians of, and more, “pathology” is a mystical wellspring of bare — Liberal — intentionalism), the Gnostic reading must see what is sickeningly obvious. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign is a poisoned letter to academia: primordial exchange value is Deleuze’s own Différence, one that precedes what it differentiates, presented by Baudrillard as collapsed into the awful actuality of “Capitalism” (things are, of course, much worse than this), this Repetition, however, produces something truly new for once: the revelation that the Différence-Repetition blueprint is the first bank note. Deleuze claims that Différence-Repetition is either behind Capitalism, as an Ontology opposed to the alleged self-sameness of Capitalism in Liberal mythology, or ahead of it, as a revolutionary promise in and of an Epistemological horizon. The only problem is that both vistas are constitutive of the very “Capitalist” self-sameness in the first place, that is to say, the Différence of primordial exchange value cloaks itself in the false and mocking use value of said vistas, a symmetrically perverse Repetition. Différence beguiles one with a false distinction and Repetition beguiles with a false novelty exactly how “Capitalism” beguiles one with the Différence-Repetition sham. Indeed, the cryptic meeting point of said vistas is precisely where, and what, “Capitalism” is, and whence it sees Différence-Repetition, which is obliviously caught in their midst.

Fourth thesis: with the apparition of sign-value or of sign-form, there arises — this seems bizarre to me — the signifier-signified couple, because the sign is the set of the two. And there is produced a term-by-term assignation, signifier-signified, of which he gives at least one example in the case of the work of art, the signifier being the form, the signified being the function, and the set of the two constituting the sign or sign-value. Now, this constitutive signifier-signified, or the very elements of the sign, is as if traversed by something famous, namely the bar. The bar is very important: it is what assigns a system of relations between the signifier and the signified; it is the bar that separates the signifier and the signified. If I understand right, the sign is therefore this bar itself which distributes signifier and signified, term by term, and he devotes a long footnote to Lacan saying: yes, Lacan does not make the signifier-signified term by term, but it comes down to the same thing, there is a domain of the signifier, a domain of the signified, and there is the bar.

And, last proposition: this bar of the signifier and signified, this constitutive bar of the sign and the sign-form, well, far from revealing something, it hides and occults. What it hides and occults, we don’t know yet. What is important at this level is that this is where I also see, whether fulfilled or non-fulfilled it does not matter, a part of the program of the theory of production of statements, namely to attempt to situate the problem of the unconscious and to renew the problem of the unconscious as a function of this question of the production of statements.

The sixth chapter of For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign begins with a rhizomatic arrangement of value. Disregarding Deleuze’s extremely vulgar demand for a Darwinian chain of value (the Continental demands proof of a Philosopher’s prostration before this perennial erection of value just as the Liberal demands proof of employment), the theory of which would inevitably be nothing but a new link in said chain, what is obvious (at least to the Gnostic) is that value needs nothing but the rhizome for the presence of the fabled value form, what is less obvious is that the rhizome allows for nothing other than value, that it is the — Platonic — value Form. Those who charge Deleuze fans rent or deny them healthcare could be said to do so on account of their superior understanding of the Deleuzian thesis. Every time a Capitalist claims that Capitalism has lifted people out of poverty, this is never the point, rather, the teeming ever-growing multiplicity that is exponentially liberated is always emphasized. The quivering praises speaking of millions, billions, even countless people almost let the odious formula of LIFE = VALUE slip (per Baudrillard’s thesis, “dead labor” is an apology of the Demiurgic principle of living Capital), and it would were it not for the likes of Deleuze. Do landlords not immanentize the very “nomadic war machine” in and of the tactics of their rental property? To say nothing of medical companies and “bodies without organs”! Capitalists commit tax evasion, embezzlement, fraud, etc., exactly how Deleuze squirms away from Hegel and Plato. Moreover, both describe such maneuvers as fundamentally good, always as an outpouring of love (solicitude). Indeed, are said Deleuze fans not precluded from realizing this precisely by reading Deleuze? Regardless, the Catholic saints could be said to have kept their eyes, among other orifices, open for nothing but the erection of the iconic Liberal line. Quite the assemblage.

Richard Pinhas: And this approach will yield a reconciliation in symbolic exchange as a result. I absolutely do not understand how he brings about this symbolic exchange.

Deleuze: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Basically, you understand even less than me. I was looking for someone who understands better … [Silence of students] Since you don’t want to speak, I’ll tell you what seems bizarre to me. To the question: what produces statements? … What produces statements in a capitalist formation or in another [social formation], since, after all, what choice is left to us? In any case, desire is lack, lack of itself, loss of itself, it is castration; indeed it’s through castration that one accedes to desire. What produces statements in the capitalist regime is what occludes castration, namely the bar … But I don’t understand why the bar occludes castration.

Incidentally, one can surely conclude that, if Deleuze et al. are vexed by a text as basic as For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, their non-reaction to Forget Foucault (by all means still an academic text) is not even hysteria, just bestial incomprehension.

Deleuze: Yes. He even says that symbolic castration is beyond the difference of the sexes. [Pause] In any case, what produces statements is castration. So that interests us and it does not interest us. It interests us since castration being, according to Baudrillard, at the very heart of desire, it is indeed a way of linking the problem of the production of statements to the problem of the posing of desire, and the formula ‘what produces statements is castration’ … — so in effect, a striptease dancer has a system of non-verbal statements that is linked to a code, the code of strip-tease; an African dance is another code; there are non-verbal statements — castration would therefore be what produces all statements, in two possible modes: either an occluded castration, or as an exhibited castration; which amounts to saying that what produces statements, in any case, is the splitting of the subject. Either the subject can be split by the bar of the signifier and signified, or it can be split in some other way — why it should be split, I don’t know — I’m keeping in mind the article on ‘The Body’ with regard to symbolic value. What is the difference between what exhibits and what hides castration, asks Baudrillard?

On that note, and apropos of the vulgarity that Baudrillard is an “obsessional” thinker, Deleuze also references The Body, or the Mass Grave of Signs (later included in Symbolic Exchange and Death). The breadth of this essay alone already surpasses that of the whole Deleuzian bibliography (Symbolic Exchange and Death likewise surpassing the whole Continental edifice), and this reference perfectly illustrates this. From its many contents, including almost explicitly Christological meditation of the highest order (the good strip and the bad strip perfectly map onto the Atonement and Victor, respectively), Deleuze singles out desire, now a fortunately dead subject, but is his tiresome fixation with the supposed desire-need distinction not itself illustrative of the fact that desire was never a subject any more than a “reality” to begin with? In Deleuzian parameters: assuming that there is such a thing as an economy (of course, there is not), the beggar begs with the same insistence with which the Liberal has accumulated his wealth and warped not so much the Capital but the economic field itself, thus the supposed concavity of need and the convexity of desire are two sides of the same plane. This is incidentally (?) noted by Baudrillard himself in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, the second chapter describes needs not as concave byproducts of alienation and such but precisely as excrescences, and, moreover, as excrescences worshiped, and mandated, as primeval — that is to say, need only distinguishes itself from desire by fulfilling the supposed definition of desire better than desire itself. An entry point to Baudrillard’s lifelong Hegelianism (which goes as unmentioned as his Gnosticism, never mind reading, do his peers even think?) and, indeed, to the fact that Baudrillard is perhaps the first true Hegelian: desire is only a desire for need alone, and need is only a need for desire alone — the most sublime Deleuzian nuances painted on an all but literal pyramid scheme.

The difference is that in the case of what exhibits castration, one sees the radical difference — I am quoting exactly — that traverses the subject in its irreducible ambivalence. But that’s a bit odd, because ambivalence was what came out of castration, but it turns out that the regime of ambivalence is another irreducible difference. In any case, it is a splitting of the subject that produces the statement. It is once again the old thesis we saw a long time ago: namely, the production of statements by a subject brings with it, through the effect of the statement itself, the splitting of the subject into the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement.

If, to the question: what produces statements? we are told that it is the splitting of the subject, our preceding analyses were tending towards a contrary result, namely that the splitting of the subject was a very precise effect obtained in order to prevent all production of statements. It is easy to show that, from the moment that a subject is split into subject of the statement and subject of enunciation, far from that engendering the least statement, it is the condition under which no statement can be produced. It is the same condition, and not by chance, that is at work with the psychoanalytic machine, when I was asking why and how it is that the psychoanalytic machine is set up to prevent any production of statements, at the very moment that it pretends to say to the poor patient: go right ahead, you can produce your statements here. All that was needed was the machine of interpretation. The whole of psychoanalysis lies in this: in your relations with your friends, with your work, with your children, etc., you are subject of the statement; in your relations with me, the psychoanalyst, and through the relation to me, the psychoanalyst, you are subject of enunciation.

Hence Lacan’s formidable stroke of calling the analysed person analysand. That consists in saying to someone: come and sit yourself on the couch, you will be the producer of statements, you will be the subject of enunciation. Before, psychoanalysts were much more modest because they said something like: if you are on the couch, and if you speak, you will, through the intermediary of my interpretation, accede to the status of subject of enunciation. This is why with the Lacanian recalibration, the psychoanalyst has less and less need to speak, he is more and more silent. The splitting is always assured in the same manner: throughout all your real life, you will be the subject of the statement; you accede to subject of enunciation in relation to the analyst who interprets what you are doing in your real life, so that you are only subject of enunciation in the cabinet of the analyst.

Now, it is precisely this machine that suppresses all the conditions of enunciation. So that if Baudrillard’s thesis consists in saying to us: what produces statements is a split subject. Whether it is split according to the system of sign-value, or split in the system of symbolic value, it amounts to the same: it confuses the production of statements with its very opposite, namely what prevents and what suppresses all the conditions for the production of statements. That’s the first point.

Although the unintentionally insulting accusation of psychology is the highlight of the lecture, this degenerates into veritably pre-Philosophical vulgarity. The most banal Hegelianism (the bar is that which grants access to that which it bars, etc.) is treated as taboo, the Deleuzian mouth and the Anglo mouth move in unison — a state of affairs so Deleuzian that not even Deleuze himself has anticipated it. What distinguishes Philosophy liberated from its supposed servitude to the state, an idea that is ultimately as vague as its association with Hegel, from Philosophy dumped into scum-sucking utilitarianism, production, bestial realism, etc.? The Liberal debasement has never produced anything but questions, horizons, effervescence, etc., just as Deleuze has never Philosophized proper, just produced an apology of said venality. They are as inseparable as mucus and membrane. Deleuzian actualities, such as drug use, readily confirm this: mental wanderlust is identical with characteristically Liberal (and idiotic) bodily wanderlust, the commodity safari, the onanism of sport, the treasury of “health”, etc., it is all mirrored in the drug-induced imaginary, a perfectly symmetrical tending to the “value form” of life itself — both constitute a cretinous polishing, pruning, preparation for and propitiation of the wanderlust itself. Mind and body are thereby rendered identical and identically worthless. Moreover, the nightmare of “bare life” or “the Real” is nothing but said wanderlust, one that everyone is exiled TO, not from, by motion itself. In this sense, if Marx ever seems obtuse it is simply because he affirms a liberation of Capital from everything else, as does Deleuze and all other Catholics. Of course, this is no surprise to the Gnostic, who knows that the Pharisaic discipline is an apology of indefinite exchange as the prerogative of Yaldabaoth. Indeed, Baudrillard, or Jesus Christ, denying his “becoming Yahweh” is the Gnostic catastrophe.

The second point is that it is all very well to put use-value into question; he is surely right. But to put use-value into question in order to rely on exchange-value does not seem to me sufficient because, while you’re at it, if you keep exchange value, you reintroduce use-value. Baudrillard has alighted on an interesting problem, but which seems to me lost in advance: how to engender sign-value, that is to say, the sign-form, as he himself often says, that is to say, how to produce statements, how to engender them starting from exchange-value? Now, it seems that his answer either invokes a miracle or a parallelism. The miracle would be the act of expenditure which would transform, within exchange, exchange value into sign-value. In this case, I don’t see any very precise analysis, except strangely enough, in the case of the sale of paintings at an auction — and all the same it’s a bit weird to conceive the capitalist system in the mode of the sale of paintings at auction. Because of his elimination of the category of production, the subordination of production to consumption, what he retains as the model of the capitalist object is not the machine, it is the gadget; this was already visible in his first book The System of Objects, where what he had in mind was a psychoanalysis of the object, and he was obliged therefore to conceive of machines as super-gadgets, instead of conceiving gadgets as residues of machines or as miniaturized machines. The model of the gadget: he is indeed obliged to take such a model, that is to say, to ignore the whole machinic power [puissance] of both desire and of capitalism; he is indeed forced to completely occlude the power of the machine and the nature of the machine, in order to engender, starting from exchange-value … in order to crapulously engender sign-value, or the sign-form, from exchange-value, through a simple operation of expenditure.

All of Deleuze’s confusion is oriented around his inability to think Evil. Or rather, the dispersion of Deleuzian thought is an apology of Evil. Baudrillard only addresses “production” or “liberation” to note their complicity, the only liberation is toward the pitch-black inside of a machine, and, in the truly Molochian sense, the only production is the atrocious expenditure of liberation. What is the meaning of the Molochian semblance? It is to keep asking this wrong question. Rather, can semblance be anything but Molochian? Of course, one can understand neither Baudrillard’s analysis of sign, symbol, simulacrum, etc. nor Christianity without a principle of Evil. Can one even think without it? Even here, bog-standard Hegelianism is seemingly inexplicably missed. It is neither “the subordination of production to consumption” nor the planar coincidence of consumptive concavity and productive convexity. This coincidence is not what is seems: the vacillation between the two faces of the plane is itself a kind of “production”, one that supersedes both the tiresome Différence-Repetition and the supposedly Hegelian motion currently mandated by Continentalism (a theoretical strabismus as uncanny and ultimately as appointed as Deleuze’s final concession to Hegel), and, moreover, the vacillation is not between concavity and convexity, but is received by a bilateral “consumption” — the convexity is sucked into a concavity even greater than the one constituting its obverse. The Gnostic will surely notice that the Catholic edifice toward the horizon of the convex obverse of said greater concavity is indistinguishable from the explicitly condemned return to a taboo virginity preceding the planar warping — that is to say, Catholicism is ouroboric and Gnosticism tramples on the serpent’s head.

When use-value has been suppressed, while conserving exchange-value, one does not give oneself any condition to account for any transmutation at all, except in one case: the system of parallelism. As far as the book on the Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign goes, it seems to me that what’s involved is an operation that remains completely miraculous — this transformation of exchange-value into sign-value. With regard to the article on ‘The Body’, a parallelist point of view clearly appears between money [argent] and phallus.

This money-phallus parallelism, which will guarantee the passage from exchange-value, which is made with material money, to sign-value which is made with the formal phallus — a passage from material money, from material exchange, to formal phallic sign — this is what allows him, simply in the name of a metaphor or of a parallelism, to nimbly get away with saying: it is not embarrassing to establish a metaphor between money and the phallus because the phallus itself is a metaphor …

We fall back into a parallelist system; it was a question of knowing how desire invested the economy, and we fall back onto a simple parallelism between two economies; namely the transformation exchange-value/sign-value can only be done through a parallelism between money grasped as distinctive materiality and the phallus grasped as differential formality, this is where a system of parallelism between the two comes into play, and from that moment, it no longer at all keeps its implicit promise, namely: to show how desire invests the economy; it makes a junction through symbolization, through metaphor or through parallelism between two economies, a political economy and an economy of desire.

Finally, it is worth noting the fundamentally Baudrillardean form of the lecture itself: through the fog of undue imputation, ascription, anticipation, etc. Deleuze makes an off-hand remark about “parallelism” as an improper theoretical maneuver — but what else could account for him having read so much nonsense into Baudrillard’s book if not a literal “junction through symbolization”? Recall that Baudrillard was practically no one in 1973. There is much to Philosophize about regarding the “symbolic obligation” and Narcissistic illusion, but suffice to say that Baudrillard commits no such theoretical mishaps and puts a military sabre through Deleuze’s skull in Forget Foucault.