Revolution is made out of desire, not duty

How Deleuze and Guattari align w/ Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky on the role of art

[Art by

April Burke

]

why do many of those who have or should have an objective revolutionary interest maintain a preconscious investment of a reactionary type? And more rarely, how do certain people whose interest is objectively reactionary come to effect a preconscious revolutionary investment? Must we invoke in the one case a thirst for justice, a just ideological position, as well as a correct and just view; and in the other case a blindness, the result of an ideological deception or mystification? Revolutionaries often forget, or do not like to recognize, that one wants and makes revolution out of desire, not duty. Here as elsewhere, the concept of ideology is an execrable concept that hides the real problems, which are always of an organizational nature.

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we hold […] that art and science have a revolutionary potential, and nothing more, and that this potential appears all the more as one is less and less concerned with what art and science mean.

—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari[1]

A project undertaken in the wake of the mass uprising of students and workers of May ’68 in France, Anti-Oedipus: Captialism and Schizophrenia [1972] is a work of collaboration between a philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and a psychoanalyst and revolutionary socialist, Felix Guattari. Based in part in a careful reading of Marx’s Capital, Deleuze and Guattari develop a political and social form of psychoanalysis, including original theories about fascism, contemporary madness, and the revolutionary potentials of art and science.

For Deleuze and Guattari, from wherever and from whichever form among the exploited masses it will emerge, the revolutionary break from capitalism will ultimately be a product of desire. Rather than, for example, a sense of duty or merely on the basis of “a just ideological position;” the revolution is made out of desire or it is not a revolution at all. This doesn’t mean it’ll be purely spontaneous. To the contrary, the revolution will have “been prepared by a subterranean labor of causes, aims, and interests working together;”[2] the working class “can constitute itself only by a counterinvestment that creates its own interest in terms of new social aims, new organs and means, a new possible state of social syntheses.”[3] Hence, revolutionaries ought to work with artists and psychoanalysts, that the forging of class consciousness that is the task of a revolutionary socialist movement will require input and insights of art and analysis as well as science, for art and science have a revolutionary potential:

What is at stake is not merely art or literature. For either the artistic machine, the analytical machine, and the revolutionary machine will remain in extrinsic relationships that make them function in the deadening framework of the system of social and psychic repression, or they will become parts and cogs of one another in the flow that feeds one and the same desiring-machine, so many local fires patiently kindled for a generalized explosion.[4]

In many ways, Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about the revolutionary potential of art align with ideas formulated in a 1938 manifesto co-authored[5] by French surrealist André Breton, Mexican painter Diego Rivera, and Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky—a manifesto which in its creation and in its principles represents the kind of intrinsic relationship Deleuze and Gauttari call for between revolutionaries, artists, and analysts.

Towards a free revolutionary art

The independence of art – for the revolution.

The Revolution – for the complete liberation of art!

—Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky

In late spring of 1938, progenitor of the Surrealist movement Breton traveled to Mexico to deliver a series of lectures. Upon arriving, he was greeted by Rivera who offered him and his wife a place to stay and an invitation from the Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky for a visit. Trotsky was there in exile from the Soviet Union and under the constant threat of assassination by Stalin’s secret police. This meeting was especially important to Breton, for whom Trotsky’s influence had played a substantial role throughout the various stages of the Surrealist movement. And in their meetings in Mexico, Trotsky would influence Breton once more – this time directly. Trotsky “greeted the news of Breton’s visit with high interest” and “immediately began planning for the Surrealist to spearhead an independent writers’ federation in France.”[6]

By their second of several meetings in Mexico, Trotsky suggested Breton draft a manifesto to inaugurate such a movement, a project which Breton found utterly daunting and which he ultimately only began to pursue under the pressure of Trotsky. By mid-July, Breton began to make progress on a draft of such a manifesto based on their shared ideas. After several drafts, Trotsky, with the help of a translator, wove his own contributions into the text, and on July 25, 1938 the final draft of “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” was complete and signed by Breton and Rivera (in place of Trotsky).[7]

Amidst the Great Depression, with another world war looming and authoritarian forces ascendent across Europe, the authors of the manifesto express a concern for the threat to the conditions for intellectual creativity and emphasize the potential of artists and writers to contribute to the overthrow of regimes which threaten them. They define “True art” as that which “insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time” and which therefore “is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society.”[8] They draw on the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation:

The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realizes that the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him. This fact alone, insofar as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the natural ally of the revolution. The process of sublimation, which here comes into play and which psychoanalysis has analysed, tries to restore the broken equilibrium between the integral “ego” and the outside elements it rejects. This restoration works to the advantage of the “ideal of self”, which marshals against the unbearable present reality all those powers of the interior world of the “self”, which are common to all men and which are constantly flowering and developing. The need for emancipation felt by the individual spirit has only to follow its natural course to be led to mingle its stream with this primeval necessity – the need for the emancipation of man.[9]

Drawing on insights from psychoanalysis on “the process of sublimation,” Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky explain how the artist allies themself with the revolution when realize the hostility toward them of the social forms which define their role as an artist under “a decadent capitalist society,” and when they challenge “the unbearable present reality” with “all those powers of the interior world of the ‘self’, which are common to all men and which are constantly flowering and developing.” Those “constantly flowering and developing” powers within the artist, those powers of the “the interior world of the ‘self’” are, of course, of the category of desire.

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Trotsky himself had years earlier described the need for reconciling Marx’s theory with psychoanalysis among other modern scientific theories. In his 1925 Literature and Revolution, Trotsky suggests the value of reconciling psychoanalysis with Marxism:

what is one to say about the psychoanalytic theory of Freud? Can it be reconciled with materialism, as, for instance, Karl Radek thinks (and I also), or is it hostile to it? […] It would be fine if a scientist would come along who could grasp all these new generalizations [the theory of relativity, psychoanalysis, theories of atomic structure] methodologically and introduce them into the dialectic materialist conception of the world. He could thus, at the same time, test the new theories and develop the dialectic method deeper.[10]

Trotsky’s interest in reconciling the methods of Marxism with those of psychoanalysis lies in the possibility of expanding upon the former into the realm of the unconscious—expanding social analysis of the conditions of capitalism into the study of the psyche. He certainly wasn’t alone in this interest as many “syntheses” of Marx’s theory with psychoanalysis would be developed throughout the 20^th Century, including by Breton as well as Deleuze and Guattari.

Using the Freudian term life instinct—the libidinal drive for self-preservation, reproduction, and pleasure—Trotsky describes the future, post-revolution need to treat “man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony [caused by exploitative conditions of capitalism], that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues,” which “give[s] the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid, and hysterical fear of death.”[11]

Notably, these descriptions of a worn-down body and a “pinched” life instinct are similar to some of the descriptions Marx’s longtime collaborator Friedrich Engels wrote in his 1845 Conditions of the Working Class in England, as I’ve covered in a previous essay on Engels’ concept of social murder. The idea of the circumstantial determination upon the physiological and emotional well-being of the working class is present in both works. This kind of analytical framework is also present in Foucault’s 1954 book Mental Illness and Personality—another work I’ve covered in a recent essay—wherein he provides a critical history and analysis of madness, drawing a direct connection between the pathological form of schizophrenia and the conditions of work in capitalist production: “the world of the machine and the disappearance of affective relations between men.” For Foucault, we should not be surprised “the morbid world” of contemporary madness appears mechanistic and devoid of affective life because it is often one of the few options available in a world that segments affective social relations of production with machines in an exploitative mode.[12]

In the works of both Engels and Trotsky there is too the idea of a natural drive to struggle against those oppressive conditions and to create better ones for a healthier, more balanced life. This kind of struggle is present as well in the art manifesto of Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky.

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While they assert that art must be free, Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky deny any intent to justify political indifference or any wish for a return to “a so-called ‘pure’ art,” where art has no influence on society’s fate other than to serve “the extremely impure ends of reaction.” To the contrary, art is to have an active and conscious role in the preparation of revolution[13]—the kind of preparation described by Deleuze and Guattari when they assert that the working class “can constitute itself only by a counterinvestment that creates its own interest in terms of new social aims, new organs and means, a new possible state of social syntheses.”[14] Hence, facing the same requirement decades earlier, Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky assert the need for the artist to actively engage in the struggle for freedom: “the artist cannot serve the struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates its social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.”[15]

Regardless of this condition for the revolutionary potential of intellectual creation, such potential cannot be realized on the basis of duty or orders from the revolutionary party, but rather must be completely without such authority. Acknowledging the possibility that the revolution may require, “for the better development of the forces of material production […] a socialist regime with centralized control,” they, on the other hand, also call for “an anarchist regime of individual liberty” in order “to develop intellectual creation:”

No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without constraint from outside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their tasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history.[16]

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The aim of this appeal is to find a common ground on which all revolutionary writers and artists may be reunited, the better to serve the revolution by their art and to defend the liberty of that art itself against the usurpers of the revolution. We believe that aesthetic, philosophical and political tendencies of the most varied sort can find here a common ground. Marxists can march here together with anarchists, provided both parties uncompromisingly reject the reactionary police patrol spirit represented by Joseph Stalin and his henchman [Spanish anarchist] García Oliver.[17]

Unfortunately, the federation called for in the manifesto was never realized as within two years of writing it, Paris was occupied by the Nazis and Trotsky was assassinated by an agent of Stalin. Breton, however, participated in May ’68 and his ideas and the ideas of the Surrealist movement were embraced by many of among the revolutionary student movement, whose political graffiti often displayed surrealist-inspired slogans and imagery.

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In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge that Lenin and the Russian Revolution had achieved the immense accomplishment of forging of “a class consciousness consonant with the objective being or interest of the class,” which “imposed on the capitalist countries a recognition of class bipolarity.” This was ultimately achieved via the stance of revolutionary defeatism during the Great War—Lenin’s position that the working class had more to gain by revolutionary struggle at home than by continuing to fight working class peoples of other nations in service of imperialists. However, not only did capitalism from without manage “its veritable mole work,” but “this great Leninist break did not prevent the resurrection of a State capitalism inside socialism itself,” resulting in the marginalization of any remaining “uncontrolled revolutionary elements;”[18] hence, the exile of people like Trotsky.

Echoing an idea of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci about how individuals can have “mixed” or “contradictory consciousness,” Deleuze and Guattari explain how several potentials can coexist within even a revolutionary organization. They write, that “[i]n reality, everything coexists […] in the same people the most varied kinds of investments can coexist at such and such a moment, the two kinds of groups can interpenetrate.” Even at the moment when some among Lenin’s party (the Bolsheviks) realized “the immediate possibility of a proletarian revolution that would not follow the anticipated causal order of the relations of forces”—that is, the contingent, unanticipated possibility of a proletarian revolution in a country, Russia, that was still largely agrarian-based, depending on whether it could spread internationally to more developed countries—others in that moment among the same party were more hesitant, not believing in that revolutionary possibility, while still there’s a third group “who ‘see’ the possibility of a new socius but maintain it in an order of molar causality [read, status quo] that already makes of the party a new form of sovereignty.” Given the third group, there’s the potential that the “subterranean labor of causes, aims, and interests” which the working class requires in order to constitute itself as a class also “runs the risk of closing and cementing the breach in the name of the new socius and its interests.”[19] It’s with these kinds of insights that Deleuze and Guattari see an important place in the movement for not only art and science but also a psychoanalytic project like their own.

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Of course, much of the context in which “Towards a free revolutionary art” was written is quite different from that of today. For example, despite what today’s biggest reactionaries would have you believe, “a socialist regime with centralized control” as well “an anarchist regime of individual liberty” are not quite on the table today, as the working class is very much unorganized relative to both 1938 and 1968. I think the general principles regarding freedom for intellectual creation still stand, however; and in many ways, the conditions for intellectual creation are once again under threat not only by the conditions of capitalism but also, increasingly so, by forces of reaction.

As fascistic and otherwise generally authoritarian ideologies and figures once again rise to power, freedom of speech of student protestors is being threatened by the Trump admin, while reactionaries on the local level are working to ban books. Climate science is continually under attack amid a climate crisis, and political figures have helped sow distrust around vaccines and virology in a period when pandemics are increasingly more likely to occur. It’s important to note that most of the distrust of modern science is the fault of ways in which science is used by corporations and imperialistic nation-states. To counter the trends of anti-intellectualism, the task remains for revolutionaries, artists, and scholars to build what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a counterinvestment by which the working class can constitute itself “in terms of new social aims, new organs and means, a new possible state of social syntheses.”

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Notes

[1]. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2009a [1977]) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (London: Penguin), 344; 379.

[2]. Ibid, 378.

[3]. Ibid, 344.

[4]. Ibid, 137.

[5]. I’ll refer to each of the three as the co-authors for sake of clarity. However, the manifesto is signed by only Breton and Rivera, but it’s generally believed that Breton and Trotsky authored the piece. The full manifesto is available online here: https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/works/rivera/manifesto.htm

[6]. Mark Polizzotti (1995) Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), 455-56; 458-9.

[7]. Ibid, 460-2.

[8]. André Breton, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky (2003) “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing), 533-4.

[9]. Ibid, 534.

[10]. Leon Trotsky (2005 [1925]) Literature and Revolution, ed. by William Keach and trans. by Rose Strunsky (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 180-181.

[11]. Ibid.

[12]. Michel Foucault (2011 [1976]) Madness: The Invention of An Idea [previously published under the title Mental Illness and Personality], trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: HarperCollins), 138-9.

[13]. Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky, 534-5.

[14]. Deleuze and Guattari, 344.

[15]. Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky, 535.

[16]. Ibid, 534.

[17]. Ibid, 535.

[18]. Deleuze and Guattari, 256.

[19]. Ibid, 377-8 [emphasis added].