The question I want to pose is not if permanent revolution is possible or
impossible. As shown, the question of possibility is not essential here. A society
for Deleuze and Guattari has a tendency toward reaching its own limits. In the
case of capitalism, they extend this claim to the point where this tendency reaches
a limit at which society as such becomes placed into question, i.e. its trajectory
leads it either toward higher democratization or to self-destruction.. This is why,
from their point of view, permanent revolution is less utopian than the view that
society can perpetuate itself or reach any form of balance of forces. However, this
utopian capacity of desire also carries with itself a destructive element. Deleuze
and Guattari hint at this problem when they state “whether and to what extent
such a socius can endure the reversal of power such that desiring-production
subjugates social production and yet does not destroy it. [Emphasis added]”223
This sentence is the crux of the problem. Deleuze and Guattari insist that
desire is not asocial 224, in other words, it always and necessarily appears as social
production. There is no desire that is not social and does not appear as a social
phenomenon. However, desire as social signifies both a socially cohesive element,
when subjected to a specific regime of organization, and a socially destructive
process which exceeds organization. But desire’s inherently social character
has nothing to do with some “social nature” of man. The social organization of
desire always presupposes both “social” and “natural” or, in other words, the
indifference between the two. The reason for this is that society presupposes
specific borders in relation to the “outside”. However, this presupposition is
its own feature of organization, not the true nature of the social which always
already stands in continuity with the purported outside. Because desire operates
beyond the sanctioned aims and goals, i.e. beyond the imposition of socially
sanctioned purposiveness, desire in itself does not differentiate between “nature”
and “society”.225
From this position it can be argued that desire does not have to be asocial in
order to destroy social production. Because desire signifies the point where social
(in the narrow sense) and natural (as the “outside”) become indistinguishable,
where all kinds of borders become abolished, the criterion of “social cohesive”
nature of desire takes on a radically different meaning. If society is one with
its “outside”, then this merging of “social” and “natural” signifies the loss of
distinction between specifically social violence (i.e. legitimate, recognized
violence) and natural violence (i.e. external, unknown and unpredictable violence). Consequently, a breakdown of the division between nature and history
in Deleuze leads to the emergence of one violence that blurs differences between
the sources, making any violence an excess that must become accommodated
into the workings of desire (and therefore abolished as violence).
The reason why this happens is that desire inherently lacks a mechanism
of cohesion which is not at the same time that of disorganization.226 Although
desire appears always in an assemblage of pre-conscious interests and established
mediated passionate investments, its true form is formless. Desire does not oppose
social formations as long as these can accommodate its productive capacity, but
it also does not lead to these social conditions emerging apart from a movement
which is always a reduction of desiring-production. Since desire inherently lacks
a purpose, it also has no predetermined social form in which it can exist. Every
purposiveness (which is internal to the formulation of social aims and goals)
appears as a reduction of desire. In other words, precisely because desire is
always found in the form of mediated interests (either socially recognized or
revolutionary ones) it will also always appear as violence – both within the
relation of socially recognized interests and revolutionary ones, and between
revolutionary aims and goals and desire itself. A society of permanent revolution
in which desire would directly invest difference itself as the driving force of
social life, without the possibility of synchronizing social interests with desire,
would still result in an excess of violence. Desire’s inherent productive capacity
cannot become contained in any form of investment, even one which directly
invests deterritorialization, because all investments in the last instance, including
these direct ones, will take on a form of some interest.
It is precisely at this point that Deleuze’s idea of desire reaches dangerous
limits, it verges on the point of internalizing destructive elements. Eugene W.
Holland has traced this dangerous limit in the shift how Deleuze and Guattari
perceive fascism. Whereas “Anti-Oedipus construes fascism (along with
paranoia) as a fixation opposed to the fluidity of desire, A Thousand Plateaus
presents fascism as a peculiar kind of acceleration of desire […]”228 As Holland
immediately notes, Deleuze and Guattari sense the danger here and add that they
“are not invoking any kind of death drive. There are no internal drives in desire,
only assemblages.”229 Desire in itself does not presuppose global personalities, as
a consequence of which it is not “rooted” in drives that would relate to the subject.
But precisely as a result of this, in relation to the subject and in relation to any
form of interest, desire appears as an excess and in this way “roots” the subject
in its own perception of violence. To put it more simply, although subjectivity
and its interest are assigned their coordinates by desire, the “apparatus of interest
[can never take] the place of a machine of desire”.230 Even if this interests were
to accommodate the primacy of desiring-production, it would still retain the form
of interest as a reduction of desire. Consequently, the problem is not that desire carries in itself a “death drive”, but that something like a death drive emerges
in the relationship of existing or emerging interests and desire itself. From this
“gap”, violence that emulates the death drive (but is not substantially grounded
in it) appears.
