Franco Berardi on Baudrillard
February 15, 2022
A few comments on a lecture given by Franco Berardi at the ‘Applied Baudrillard’ conference at Oxford Brookes in 2018. I wasn’t aware that Bifo was into Baudrillard, so discovering this came as a nice surprise. The talk helps to make clear how Baudrillard’s ideas have informed the line of thought that moves through Bifo to Mark Fisher, with its preoccupation with cultural temporality and the cancellation of the future.
What I want to talk about briefly is something at the end of the talk, which seems to me symptomatic of the way Baudrillard has often been deployed in leftwing thought, and which touches on something in Fisher that has often jarred with me. At the end of the presentation, which talks about Baudrillard’s familiar ideas concerning the eclipse of events by self-proliferating simulacra, a member of the audience asks the obvious question: what can we do? What are the political lessons we can draw from this? Bifo’s reply is that since what characterises the current situation is not a dysfunction of the social brain so much as a disconnection of the social brain from the social body, what is required is an erotic reactivation of the social body. And he is clear that the word ‘body’ is to be taken seriously here: what this project amounts to is a call to re-activate the social relation at the level of sensuality, affect, and desire. This struck me as somewhat out of line with the Baudrillard theme. And this is the part I find symptomatic: in Bifo as in Fisher, Baudrillard is recruited favourably as someone who can give us a near-prophetic description of our present conjuncture, but when it comes to responding to it we always seem to end up falling back on something much more Deleuzian in nature, namely a politics of desire. But this is something that Baudrillard is deeply opposed to (a point brought up by Gary Genosko in his introduction to the talk, incidentally). So what does all this mean?
Early in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari make the central claim that everything is produced, including antiproduction. The productivity of desire is the origin of all social (and indeed non-social) structure—even all repression, constraint and destruction is ultimately an operation of this desiring-production. As with any apparatus of social control, capitalism is only able to sustain itself through the administration of circulating flows of a depersonalised desire. What is distinctive of capitalism for Deleuze and Guattari is that it does this dynamically, in its dual tendency to de-structure existing social relations, releasing previously locked-in flows of desire, and then subtly re-capture them by instituting new modulation structures on larger scales, in a perpetual accelerating feedback loop. The practical upshot of this model is that all political battles are to be waged on the terrain of desire, because this the terrain from which all social structure ultimately springs—everything else is after the fact, as it were. If capitalism unleashes and re-captures circulating desire, then the revolutionary task is to potentiate the unleashed energies to degrees of intensity that outrun capital’s ability to recapture them (the accelerationist thought). If capital sublimates erotic energies by siphoning them off for its own ends, then to resist capital is to erotically re-activate the social relations in ways which escape or overflow the circuits of capital accumulation. Something like this seems to be what Bifo had in mind.
But Baudrillard does not think like this at all. If Deleuze and Guattari’s slogan is that everything must be produced, full stop, then Baudrillard’s is that everything produced must be seduced. Or in other words, Baudrillard disagrees that antiproduction is subsumed under production—there must, he thinks, be a primitive antiproduction, a form of antiproduction not reducible to some prior productive process. Where Deleuze and Guattari’s model is a kind of monistic vitalism, with desiring-production as its single generative principle, Baudrillard’s is governed by dual principles of production and antiproduction (seduction) which must be taken as equally primitive—a kind of Manichean dualism. Indeed, the issue Baudrillard takes with Deleuze mirrors the issue Deleuze takes with Hegel: where Deleuze wants to expunge the negative from his system of pure affirmation, Baudrillard is insisting (like Hegel) that the negative is constitutive, primitive, and non-expungible.
The practical consequences of this show up when we consider, say, the relationship between norms and desire. For Deleuze and Guattari norms are in some sense secondary or epiphenomenal—as with Nietzsche’s will to power, what one takes to be a norm or rule is merely an expression of the power of another, a downstream effect of desiring-production. But for Baudrillard this cannot be so—norms are not secondary effects of some prior force which is really structuring the social body, they are irreducibly constitutive of social relations themselves. It is not that Baudrillard is without a concept of the erotic—indeed, he often describes the present predicament in terms of a de-eroticisation of the world—but what is crucial is that for him the erotic has nothing to do with the body and desire. If anything, the erotic concerns a certain negation of desire in the formal play of rituals and games (though even this retains a residue of the hydraulic imagery that he is so sceptical of). For Baudrillard, the erotic always means bringing the brute contingency of sense and matter under the normative necessity of an arbitrary symbolic logic.
Insofar as Baudrillard offers a theory of how capital decomposes the social relation, it is not that it inhibits or sublimates desiring-production for its own ends, but rather that it forecloses antiproduction. Ultimately what this yields is a massive over-production: a metastasis of desire. But if this is right, then the Deleuzian model is utterly complicit in this metastasis: unable to properly conceptualise antiproduction, it can only endorse its foreclosure as an intensification of desiring-production. In this sense it does capital’s work for it, and can never outrun its processes of reterritorialisation—in fact this very image is misconceived. Anyway, the aim here is not to harangue Bifo for an off-the-cuff comment, but just to highlight that there is something deeply ambiguous about a call to ‘erotically re-activate social relations.’ If this call is taken up in the spirit of an Applied Baudrillard, it should be interpreted carefully, and without Deleuzian connotations.