5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
logic of capitalist discourse, where desire is channelled into prescribed pathways,
Deleuze and Guattari argue that the impersonalized flows of schizoid desire can
herald a radical transformation of society.
Similar theoretical directions are taken in the early writings of the French philosopher
Jean-François Lyotard, who argues that political society is itself secretly libidinal.
Whereas Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is codified and repressed in and through
capitalism, Lyotard views contemporary society as an immense desiring system. As he
sees it, the postmodern is a vast libidinal circuit of technologies, a culture swamped with
seductive signs and images. In underscoring the indeterminancy of intensities, Lyotard
effects a shift in focus away from theories of representation and structures of the psyche
and toward bodily intensities and erotogenic surfaces. In his book Libidinal Economy
(1993), Lyotard constructs the excitations of libido on the model of the Moebius strip,
conceptualized as an endless series of rotations, twistings and contortions.
The upshot of this, in political terms, is a series of arguments about how best to
extract libidinal pleasure and intensity from postmodern culture. ‘What would be
interesting’, writes Lyotard,’ would be to stay where we are, but at the same time to
grab all opportunities to function as good conductors of intensities’ (1974:311).
In terms of postmodernism, the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and of Lyotard,
underscores the point that contemporary experience is an experience of
fragmentation, dislocation, polyvalency. From this angle, the belief that social
transformation may be linked to the undoing of hidden meanings or discourses
(as suggested in psychoanalytic social theory from Marcuse to Habermas) appears
as little more than an ideological fantasy. By contrast, truth in postmodern
psychoanalysis is located in the immediacy of libidinal intensity itself. The
unconscious cannot be tamed or organized; desire needs no interpretation, it simply
is. Moreover, it is within the diffuse, perverse, and schizophrenic manifestations of
desire that new forms of identity, otherness, fantasy and symbolism can be found.
The issues raised by postmodern psychoanalysis are important, especially when
considered in the light of contemporary social transformations such as globalization
and new communications technology. It is not apparent, however, that such theories
generate any criteria for the critical assessment of social practices, politics, or value
positions. As Dews (1987) points out, the dissimulation of libidinal intensities urged in
many currents of postmodern psychoanalysis is something that can be ideologically
marshalled by both progressive and reactionary political forces. Significantly, the view
that desire is ipso facto rebellious and subversive is premised upon a naive