Desiring-production

"There is only desire and the social, and nothing else."

-- Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

I will attempt to speak more clearly in this post about what I mean to say, or rather, about what I understand myself to be doing. What I am focused on more than anything is what can be done, what can be enacted, what can disturb social processes and form new ones. I wholeheartedly believe we can only do this through investing ourselves -- investing our desires, our beliefs, our hopes -- into the social field. But not from outside this field, as if "we" are not constituted by it. It would make no sense if we weren't: what would be the point of investing in something with no return? I'm interested in this return, this revenue, since when one invests something one always wants something in return, to come back to one. That's the image of economy, the image of the circle.

What does it mean that action happens when we invest desire into the social field? It means that education is no longer the great excuse for the position that we're in. Nor is it some "rational" or "self-interested" or "self-centered" choice -- which, I believe amounts to the same thing. That was perhaps Marx's biggest mistake: to believe that miseducation or the lack of education is the main reason for the repression of the proletariat. "If people were only educated, if they only knew, then..." The if-then of politics, which is related to the cause-effect of scientists, is perhaps one of the greatest sins against continuing political action, that is, against creating true revolutionary behavior. We need to stop seeing desire as being haunted by selfishness or economic gain. "I want what I do not have, and when I do have what I want, I want it forever." And we need to stop seeing desire as the primal force that comes before education, and which is restrained after one becomes well educated. Desire involves investing oneself into ways of living and into an understanding of how one lives.

The truth is -- people's oppression goes hand-in-hand with their investments of desire; and these investments aren't necessarily educated or rational. Nor are they selfish or self-interested, even though the self is a necessary part of it. To invest desire is to invest the body, but not simply the body, but, to borrow from Bourdieu, the habitus. The place of habit, of ritual. In other words, we need to stop thinking of the body as an object, a stationary, rigid thing, but as an active force, a locus of activity, of multiple activities. The infant experiences the body as forces letting him eat, suck, grab, kiss, bite, hug -- that is, as forces which let him connect to other forces or activities. He doesn't experience the body as an image -- as we seem to do in anatomy -- but as that which allows him to make images of the world, of ways of living.