Discourse, Desire and Foreign Policy#
Alexandre de Lima Castro Tranjan
Attorney, PhD Candidate in Philosophy and General Theory of Law, Law School, University of São Paulo
DOI 10.55167/889c53b9fa56
Introduction#
The fact that this text is signed by what we call an author is rather unimportant. As we shall discuss in this paper, names have only a very practical function: designating communication subjects for the communication itself to be possible. As well as the author of the present text is only useful insofar as he operates an assemblage of different ideas, sources, personal impressions and historical observations, achieved in the randomness flow of history, the mentioned authors cited are also machines whose grandeur is by no means the merit of absolute originality, but precisely by making newness emerge from the machination of the fragments they have collected and connected by themselves.
Thus, when we trace the ideas we bring from the works of Althusser, Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, Pashukanis, Nietzsche and so on, it is not only a precaution against plagiarism, but also a task of locating historically and geographically the encounters between the aforementioned fragments. If only in the light of May of 1968 in France could Marxism experience such a revolution in its theory of desire, it is time for, from a different context, that is, of rise in armed conflicts around the world, developing ideas capable not only to offer lines of flight from imperialism, but also to criticise the very ideals of the bourgeois democracy and the everlasting prevalence of capitalist interests in its concrete political results, no matter the flag the elected party halts or the values the foreign policy claims to apply.
Of course, this text is as urgent as provisory. Urgent, since it tries to address the most ardent events taking place in the present time. Those problems, if we try to recollect the bigger picture to avoid a false, partial approach, require an in-depth investigation far beyond our capacities, as a consequence of its urgency. Therefore, we call it provisory, for it at least tries to give (even false) answers to the true questions, instead of the ideological work of “specialists” who readily offer true answers to false questions. Our goal is to path the way, in the right direction but with which will possibly prove to be insufficient pavement, for further and more accurate interpretations laying other strata on ours.
In the contemporary scenario, there seem to be two contrastant trends, or even one single, but ambivalent tendency. The first inclination, or the first phenomenon of that large tendency, is the rise in number and enacting mechanisms of Human Rights, as well as in its relative importance to the public debate. On the other hand, after some ten years of stability following the fall of the Berlin Wall — what we will call Pax americana from now on — , what we witness around the globe is a sharp increase in military interventions, coups d’état and proxy wars, recalling the previous decades of Cold War.
Even in so-called democratic, free countries, we are often struck by a persistent feeling of lack of liberty, even if there seems to be no way to properly address it, since access to civil rights and goods never seemed to be so easy. It is challenging to explain that, as we become more free, paradoxically we become more entangled in an immaterial prison we cannot even describe properly, as it takes the form of ultimate freedom.
The restrictions of freedom can only be seen as negative when the objects of such freedom are desirable. It would sound absurd if someone rejoiced about — or complained about the lack of — freedom to do some undeniably unpleasant or harmful activity, unless that activity was believed to provide some benefit or hidden pleasure. Thus, freedom is only an ideal as long as its object — actual or possible — is to some extent desirable. This observation is decisive to our discussion, since the problem of a freedom we can’t even ascribe properly is that of a paradoxically desirable unfreedom. Inbedded in dopamine feedback cycles, everyone knows that social media, entertainment and industrial culture are severely limiting one’s freedom of will by its propaganda, and of action by its sequestration of free time. At least, if it is not so easily observable that the algorithms function as ideological apparatuses (Tranjan, 2023a:98), it is easy to perceive the fact that they drain one’s lifetime. But it is enjoyable!
Robert Nozick presented us with what can be understood as the 21st century’s ultimate dilemma: a raw and dry liberty or a satisfying unfreedom? Surveilled security or unprotected (against what?) liberty? Again, the question is not the same as in the slave-master dialectics, unless we argue that lack of pain means pleasure, i. e., lack of fear of being killed is in itself a good. But now we are talking not about relief of the risks of fighting back — which does not even prolong our times in life, since a slave can be easily killed without trying to resist — but of the pleasure of enjoying the agreeable company of an apparently benevolent master. The most comfortable position, on the contrary of painful slavery, is exactly being unfree, which does not even have the appearance of unfreedom. Our society of control is not that one as in Clockwork Orange, in which the protagonist Alex suffers a disciplinary sanction as a consequence of violating the law by commiting several horrendous crimes, such as rape and murder. Differently from Alex, we are under arrest by doing nothing, because now the prison is a widespread social form, controlling and preventing individuals not of simply commiting crimes, but also and more importantly, of challenging a repressive social order.
Foucault’s predicament of the generalisation of panopticism is fully achieved in the conversion from disciplinary to control societies, which also represents an inflection in the means by which power is exercised upon individuals (Han, 2018:55-7). Instead of suffering from bodily harm, now we achieve jouissance (literally, if one thinks about porn industry) while being tortured , not in our bodies, which feels only pleasure, but in our subjectivities and dopamine receptors. And, for it operates in this area, it becomes less noticeable, since the subjectivities themselves that are defined by the forms of control are shaped in a way that they become incapable of perceiving such violence. We cannot ascribe the unfreedom we feel because that unfreedom is in itself the means by which it hides itself. The maxim according to which the strongest power is the one that becomes natural, unnoticed, applies perfectly to the case of a system of repression in the shape of freedom, and that not only tries to justify itself, but also forecloses the thought of possibilities of change (Žižek, 2011:39, 208-9, 303-5). That is why we can see nowadays as a time of presentism, for we are so deeply merged in passive anhedonia and a self-inflicted control that we cannot even imagine an alternative (Fisher, 2022:1-3, 17, 22-23, 48-49, 54). It is now impossible to be truly free without rejecting the social pact of acceptance of a common Big Other.
In that scenario of seemingly absolute unfreedom, it is not anymore plausible to describe ideology as a simple process of convincing someone of the ideals of the bourgeoisie, as a deceiving way to make the proletariat act against its own interests. Instead, ideology always have composed, which nowadays intensifies as it gains more accurate apparatuses, a desire-levelled form of construction of subjectivities (Tranjan, 2023a:98; Tranjan, 2023b:86; Tranjan, 2023c:537-539; Althusser, 2014:75-77; Althusser, 2015:192). Thus, we are set to imagine a concept of ideology that is in itself the very fabric of the Big Other corresponding to it, that is, the means by which not simply what we believe, but also of what we understand as right or wrong, is made of what we see.
The Althusserian conceptualisation is the one which for the first time understood about the building of subjectivities in which true ideology really consists. But it was Deleuze and Guattari who understood that even the building of horizons of worldview and social relations representation, is that desire is what really matters when it comes to ideology. But how is desire related to common, ordinary lives? It would otherwise feel as if we were talking only about lust or something. That is not the point, indeed. This paper will, then, ascribe the connection between desire, discourse and ideology and commonly seeing and saying about the world, and how it interferes in ongoing geopolitical processes. The underlying, so to say, metaphysical assumption is to see each event as the encounter of different forces that can or cannot produce various possible outcomes. The Epicurean idea of randomness at the same time appeases the individual but also gives a sense of humbleness, since we perceive that we are not gods, or if we are, only it is because we can play with the aleatory.
In order to address those intriguing questions, we will first of all introduce the discussion about the plurality of the mind and its shape by language and desire. Thereafter, it will be discussed how that mind can manage language in order to advance its desires and intentions in a very pragmatic way, always politically inserted. This will not be enough, however, to properly describe how human subjectivity works, since that would result in a rather autonomist, erroneous postulate. Therefore, it will be necessary to describe the opposite process, namely, how the subject is susceptible to be affected by discourse and ideological interpellations. By following both paths, from desire to discourse and from discourse to desire, it will be possible to connect the composition of the mind with larger social structures. If Das Wahre ist das Ganze (Hegel, 1977:§ 20), we will be able to search for truth about the subject in the totality of the social structure in which it is inescapably inserted — some say, dejected.
1. There is someone in my head, but it’s not me#
“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections” (Deleuze; Guattari, 1983:8).
It is an error to assume that the individual could be understood as such departed from its deeper characterization as an arrangement of machines. When I write, when I think, when I desire, when I talk, it’s always a conglomerate of impulses that define the direction towards which I am heading. The “I” is then only used due to a grammatical imposition. Perhaps we could assign I as “it” or something that inhabits my head, but it’s not identifiable as and I — as the Pink Floyd song describes, “there’s someone in my head/but it’s not me”. Nevertheless, it is still somewhat artificial even to ascribe the individual as something, as an “it”. Instead, it is a plurality of impulses of conflicting voices of desires. Several, so to say, machines, compose what we usually call an individual, and they function by constantly creating disjunctive synthesises, that is, the junction of different stimuli into one experience process, one Gestalt. Instead of a subject, we have a multitude of existential possibilities artificially encompassed into a single abstraction.
It can be thought of as an act of power to limit the infinite multiplicity of possibilities of what we call, by grammatical necessity, a subject, into the limiting category of an individual. The linguistic act of naming something is in itself an act of violence, since it means an interpellation to the limitation of its possibility of being other than its own, that is, becoming. This procedure is sheer violence, albeit natural to socialisation, since to become-Other is itself the process of becoming itself, by a double negation. The mirroring process of reshaping e retransformation is, at least in the level of identity and social denomination, limited to a given name, a denomination which implies certain fixedness. Instead, since life itself can only be unreligously understood as an unfixed situation, since not rooted in any permanent bounds, the rule of Being over the Becoming is indeed a process of power (Hegel, 1977:§36, 37, 53, 54, 55, 110, 117, 124-8, Kalkavage, 2007:49-52, Safatle, 2023:34, Žižek, 2011:320, Clastres, 2020:155-6, Bracco, 2021:99).
2. A pragmatic approach#
Departing from these ideas, we can organise some postulates about the mind and its language. First, consciousness is fractured, as its subject can only be understood as something like an empty vessel into which different contents enter the space of action of desiring machines that make our possibilities of becoming, that produce the chances to create and transform oneself. The subject is always this failure to fully achieve the symbolic identity with the superego, and because of that underachievement of the Big Other, the referring horizon of representation, the ego is capable of some extent of subversion, by the operation of the machines that compose the unconscious.
These creative forces of lines of flight, i. E., virtual becomings of emancipation, are indeed manifested in linguistic forms, since it is in linguistic terms that the unconscious is constituted, by the internalisation of the symbolic order. These discursive forms of mediation incorporate the shape of orders; everything we say and do in a speech are commands, immediate and explicitly or indirect and implicitly. They can induce behaviours that we expect from other people, even if not directly expressed in the form of a request or something similar. The pragmatic function of language is the social interchange and social agency promoted by language, and it prevails over the communicative function, for it offers direction to its management. In other words, communication, to the extent it implies some sort of agency, is determined by the intention behind the act of speech whence it departs. In sum, language is a socio-political tool to act in society and to conduct the lines of desire into a social field.
In this sense, there is an inescapable prevalence of context to understand language. The very concrete forms of discourse, the language games, are prevailing over the inner semantics of phrasal structures; the context is what gives the message its very meaning (Deleuze; Guattari, 1980:108). The context of the act of enunciation is more important to understand language than the statements themselves. Identical propositions can have opposite meaning depending on its circumstances. The etymology of circumstance, in this context, must be taken into consideration to elucidate the manifold senses in which it impacts the meaning of the sentences there inserted. Circum stare indicates what is around, refers to every aspect of communication exterior to the words themselves. The form of expression therefore determines the form of content and the substance of content just as much the opposite is true. In concrete, the intonation, the past between the agents involved in the communication, the place, the interests behind it, the emotions in the scene, what they know about each other, the means of communication, all that and more inflict severe influence on the meaning of the sentences expressed. “Linguistics is nothing without pragmatics to define the effectuation of the condition of possibility of language and the usage of language” (Deleuze; Guattari, 1980:1091), a linguistic study is nothing without the socio-political pragmatics.
3. Linguistic devices of interpellation#
As a consequence of the intricate scheme of determination of the circumstances over the meaning, this pragmatic approach on language is in itself the Becoming political of linguistics (Deleuze; Guattari, 1980:105). Thus, as language is an inherently political phenomenon, in the acts of speech it takes the form of a micropolitical (Deleuze; Guattari, 1980:33) form of managing social situations and can be used in forms of creating the becoming, it deterritiorialises the established forms of being into the actualisation of virtual becomings. That language can be used to transform the established forms of subjectivity derived from a psychoanalytical assumption, which is the possibility of transforming people by different forms of contact that often assume the form of language, the speech acts through repetition, as in the concept of subliminal advertising. The psychoanalytic premise behind it is that the unconscious is inherently linguistic in the sense that it can be conducted, mainly through repetition, into forms of being discursively constructed, which is the link between the desiring machines and the word in which they are inserted; the crowd that is our minds can be linguistically altered.
Building up the discursive determination of desire, there are several devices, that is, ideological apparatuses, that compose the machinery of subjectivation in contemporary societies. We can think, for instance, of churches, families, etc., which interpolate us from the very beginning of our lives into gender, family status, and nationality roles; one is interpolated to be a member of society according to those roles. There are several institutions that make this process possible, which are to some extent materially determined by the mode of production behind them, and which they reproduce. This mode of production, namely capitalism, requires two important factors: first, the submission of the worker to the values of the process of production, as the proletarians must be law-abiding, good, and hard-working citizens to turn the wheels of the system; second, they must desire commodities at some level. The organisation of society following the commodity-form is what determines most of its relations, and it composes these forms of subjectivity since they are required for the system to work. Surplus-value corresponds to a surplus of code, of language and meaning, which make the prevailing modes of subjectivity, the institutions of power, reproduce themselves. Agency, under this form of society, is ideologically organised (Althusser, 2014:65-7, 75-6, Tranjan, 2023a:99, Tranjan, 2023b:95).
4. Ideology and international relations#
Indeed, much can be expressed on how ideology shapes up the horizons of representation and interpretation of the world, which to some large extent determine social life. The apparatuses that construct those systems of evaluation are several, and work with relative accordance to economic and political interests, both with reciprocal influence. Indeed, for we are compelled to understand the world-economy as the necessary unity of analysis , not interpreting reality from is atoms, but instead as it whole — again, das Wahre ist das Ganze — and then pointing at global processes as determinant factors of the content of ideology.
If in times of relative peace, as we said, the Pax americana, mainstream ideology hailed the “end of history” and the irreversible hegemony of the United States of America, now it seems to appease the fears of its downfall, or claim for its triumphant, heroic defence. Ideological state apparatuses are indeed significant machines for the transitions and permanences we witness in global order. As we discussed earlier, they do promote biases in the public opinion that, to some extent, encourage or justify different sorts of foreign policy. That biases are located in jthe
First of all, it is imperative to understand the general dynamic of the social machines that compose the international Weltwirtschaft (Braudel, 1987:53) in order to locate, in that Ganze, the contemporary phenomena. Indeed, accumulation of capital is the incontournable rule of that world-economy (Wallerstein; Balibar, 2021:151), for the formation of such phenomena is an immanent rule of capitalism in its desiderata of constant expansion (Wallerstein; Balibar, 2021:22, 230). We should ascribe such dynamic of expansion as deterritorialization, for it constantly reshapes the space, the land, towards an expansion of its limits (Deleuze;Guattari, 1972:265-6). The motor of deterritorialization is in capitalism the very axiomatic of expansion required by the goal towards accumulation of capital. More markets, land, labour-power and crude materials are required for the capitalist endeavour to expand, so the desire of accumulation can be fulfilled. There is desire, although it can be reshaped, in the infrastructure of every mode of production, every social machine (Deleuze; Guattari, 1972:124). It is an object of ideology, and to some extent can be reproduced, reorganised or redirected, but it is not entirely determined by ideology, since the peoples, the past territorialities compose a field of investment, a body without organs, that recall larger narratives, older codes of evaluation that capitalism itself. Nevertheless, capitalism operates an intense and violent decodification, for it redirects those fluxes of desire in the directions defined by its axiomatic. For this reason, for every form of exercise of such power-knowledge (Tranjan, 2023b:92-6), there is a possibility of resistance (Foucault, 2020:50-2), as strong as the opacity and opposition of the social codification previous or external, to capitalism.
In between the two heads of this mechanical, but non-deterministic process of deterritorialization and decodification of fluxes — of peoples, commodities, desires — there is colonisation as the State endeavours to impose the capitalist axiomatic. It depends on a full mobilisation of both apparatuses, the hard and the soft, the “repressive” and the “ideological”. In this case, the first term seems quite inappropriate, since it does not only repress, but actively dismantles social orders by military operations. Also by the superposition of capitalism, colonisation is violent not only in the literal sense, but also related to its cultural procedure destruction and decodification of the social order, the local authorities — they either die in liberation struggle or become indirect rule puppets — , the ties with the land and basically every single aspect of society is to some extent transformed, and so is the mind (Fanon, 2022:37, 52-3, 211, 238, 333, Sartre, 2022:331, Yazbek, 2010:51, 57) and its desiring machines. Universalism and the ideology of Human Rights are a mechanism to impose the transparency of colonisation around the world, by decoding the inner values of each society (Wallerstein; Balibar, 2021:68, Said, 2007: 22, 58).
For the powers that be, it is imperative to maintain this established social order and the international division of labour, no matter the means required. Huge apparatuses of reterritorialization of the escaping fluxes are necessary to impede the lines of flight to form and the social struggle to win against the violence of colonisation (Deleuze; Guattari, 1972:280). Therefore, what we witnessed in Algeria, in Timor Leste or in Iran along different periods in the second half of 20th century are examples of the brutal process of repression of the struggle for emancipation of a people. In such events, the most important aspect is the negative force of those Events, which can deny the restricted forms of Being in order to mobilise and open the lines for a Becoming (Žižek2, 2011:367).
The dying of a hegemon, global or regional, is a clash between such forces, or even between the hegemon and a contender, which can, nevertheless, open such lines of flight for social liberation. Interventionism is a paranoiac affection of struggle to protect economic and ideological interests in some colonised area — in a broader sense of the word. Dialectically, such endeavour has the potential to take itself to an end, since the pharaonic expenses and, most importantly, occasional losses, contribute to the collapse of the imperialist machine. Every single defeat the peoples or the contending nations impose to the hegemon means an irreversible decay in its stability, since the order it forcedly imposes depends also on the representation of its incontestability. Each anticolonial win, albeit partial, reverbs around the world as a message of possibility of liberation.
This is the case because of the fact that social machines are never purely, entirely molar, that is, mass movements, but also molecular (Deleuze;Guattari, 1972:343), not necessarily individual, but in discrete forms of difference that do not always take the shape of a masse, but of a multitude. The multitude comprehends the multiplicity of merged identities and Becomings in their complexity. It is now, as the State apparatuses seem ubiquitous and incontournable, and interpell subjectivities into more and more isolated, specific forms of identities, the mechanism by which the general struggle for emancipation can function is the Unity through Difference.
5. Concluding remarks#
Thus, there are forms of transforming society, which go further than the institutional forms of subjectivity and being. There are several possibilities of becoming that can deterritorialize the status quo into new possibilities. They are, for instance, the exercise of stressing language to constitute new forms of expression, to create new ways of thinking, through linguistic experimentation, such as neologisms and regionalisms, which make the possibility of becoming minoritary real. Guimarães Rosa is its best example in Brazilian literature. Since these institutionalised powers operate on the prevailing forms of subjectivation of society, we, as agents of transformation, can question, resist, and even transform as a whole the system in which these forms of oppression are perpetrated.
As told by Deleuze and Guattari, “to write […] is to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of the day, to select the whispering voices, […] from which I extract something I call my Self (Moi). I is an order-word. A schizophrenic said: ‘I heard voices say: he is conscious of life.’ In this sense, there is indeed a schizophrenic cogito, but it is a cogito that makes self-consciousness the incorporeal transformation of an order-word, or a result of indirect discourse” (Deleuze; Guattari, 1980:107). This possibility of gathering several multiple voices in order to make an agencement of language, of an assemblage of forms of being and becoming, is the way that politics can be transformative. If new forms of power and control are created, to the many forms of oppression can correspond new forms of resistance, of transforming society.
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DOI: 10.55167/889c53b9fa56