The theater of Anti-Oedipus and Jameson's Postmodernism
march 16 2025
Recently, I had been asked on what I think about the current "state of the world"; something I would normally take to be mockery of me, but in this case, it was a genuine attempt to engage me in a political conversation. He went on about how he's had no choice but to be tuned in, that politics have been inescapably loud. Names were referenced: Trump, Trudeau, Zelensky. But, unlike my usual bitter and opinionated character that I was being asked to assume, I couldn't respond. I thought to myself that these were the politics of "faces."
Two books that only took their effect on me with time were Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari, and Postmodernism by Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism in particular, because a lot of it had gone over my head, forcing me to admit defeat and owe it a reread in at least a couple of years. However, I came to realize that Jameson, Deleuze, and Guattari had irreparably altered my understanding of the world since. My original reviews haunt me for failing to really convey their impact on my thinking. But to maintain my principle against neurotically revising my reviews and betraying them as easy, impressionistic writing exercises, I am dedicating an article to them.
Jameson's late, multinational capitalism and its progression from Deleuze and Guattari's despotic state implicates what essential element has been lost within the politics of faces: the individual. No longer is the face of the monarch -- the master signifier -- necessitated in today's discourse. Neoliberal capitalism will sustain itself no matter what face represents it: Trump, Trudeau, Zelensky, Putin, Biden, Nicolas Sarkozy… If anything, what the decentered subject looks like is a vague, borderless, corporate entity divided into an atomic system of billions of nameless shareholders. But even this is risking representation.
"And in point of fact, something new occurs with the rise of the bourgeoisie: the disappearance of enjoyment as an end, the new conception of the conjunction according to which the sole end is abstract wealth and its realization in forms other than consumption. The generalized slavery of the despotic State at least implied the existence of masters, and an apparatus of antiproduction distinct from the sphere of production. But the bourgeois field of immanence … institutes an unrivaled slavery, an unprecedented subjugation: there are no longer any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves."
- Deleuze & Guattari
The politics of faces is the reverse of Althusser's ideology that is more real the more imaginary it appears; postmodern representation is what appears the most real but is the furthest from it. Representation is the theater that is so "loud" one cannot help but "tune in." It is a spectacle; a theater that does not express as much as it performs.
"We see the most disadvantaged, the most excluded members of society invest with passion the system that oppresses them … Repressing desire, not only for others but in oneself, being the cop for others and for oneself— that is what arouses, and its not ideology; it is economy … Oh, to be sure, it is not for himself or his children that the capitalist works, but for the immortality of the system. A violence without purpose, a joy, a pure joy in feeling oneself a wheel in the machine, traversed by flows, broken by schizzes."
- Deleuze & Guattari
Individual politicians are convenient to blame. They are the image of selfishness, appealing to the problems of others for their own gain, while speaking publicly with the most unashamed arrogance. However, they all serve the same machine; by only implicating an individual's moral failure, the system responsible for allowing these people into power remains unquestioned. What appears most obvious to us as "politics" -- as what most concretely influences our daily lives -- is a theater of egos distracting from the wider system that truly conditions our material reality.
I hope I did a little justice for what Anti-Oedipus and Jameson's Postmodernism have meant for me. I'm waiting now for an order of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, and this time in the original French. I'm really excited to read it, and to be really annoying about it on my website for all my dedicated readers. That's all.