Two conceptions of desire: Harari vs. Deleuze & Guattari
Plus: Mark Zuckerberg vs. Harari on the origins of WWII
[Etching by
]Part 2.1 in my critique of Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
In telling history, Harari thinks of humans as living within a dualism between mythical reality and objective reality:
Ever since the cognitive revolution Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions, and on the other, imagined reality of Gods, nations and corporations.[i]
In other words, there is a fantasy reality and an objective reality within which humans co-exist. As I’ve explained in previous essays, in Harari’s view, the mythical reality is what enables mass cooperation and thus civilization. But how exactly does the relationship between these two realities work? How does mythical reality as an organizing force result in mass cooperation as a process within objective existence?
Harari explains that “The imagined order shapes our desires.”
In this essay, I’ll compare the idealistic conception of desire Harari offers in Sapiens with a materialistic conception offered by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari in their 1972 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
I’ll conclude with some commentary on a segment of a conversation between Harari and Mark Zuckerberg regarding the causes of extremism in society.
“The imagined order shapes our desires”
Harari describes how our desires are shaped according to the dominant myths of “a pre-existing imagined order:”
Most people do not wish to accept that the order governing their lives is imaginary, but in fact every person is born into a pre-existing imagined order, and his or her desires are shaped from birth by its dominant myths. Our personal desires thereby become the imagined order’s most important defences.[ii]
In Harari’s view, the imagined reality is what organizes our lives—our desires are shaped by it.
Explaining that "the most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries,” Harari emphasizes the compatibility of romanticism and consumerism and their combined role in creating “the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded.”[iii]
Harari’s discussion of the way in which “the imagined order shapes our desires” is largely focused on consumerism, and hence a concept of desire as being primarily driven by lack, when “we feel that something is missing:”
Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better.[iv]
No doubt, commercialism and consumerism serve to construct desires in the form of lack; however, is this the primary way in which my life is ordered? Does desire organize society foremost through lack?
“[Lack] is never primary”
Contrary to Harari’s view wherein our desires are shaped and informed by an imagined order, Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is immediately invested in social production.
In Anti-Oedipus, they worked to develop what they described as “a political and social psychoanalysis,” a “materialist psychiatry.”
They critique Platonic, idealist conceptions of desire defined by lack and acquisition:
To a certain degree, the traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very outset: from the very first step that the Platonic logic of desire forces us to take, making us choose between production and acquisition.[v]
They argue that this logic of desire—“which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object, a lack of the real object”—results in an idealistic and nihilistic conception.
Against this logic of desire as derived from lack, Deleuze and Guattari think of desire as an immanent principle of social production. Following in particular the philosophers Spinoza and Marx, as well as the psychoanalyst William Reich, they present a materialist conception of desire as a productive category;[vi] Spinoza, for example, in Ethics, describes desire as a determination to do something. Deleuze and Guattari write:
There is no particular form of existence that can be labeled "psychic reality." As Marx notes, what exists in fact is not lack, but passion, as a ‘natural and sensuous object.’ Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are derived from desire.”[vii]
For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is among the productive forces of social and economic activity, immediately within the relations of production and essential to the organization of production.[viii]
Further, if desire is a productive force at the heart of production, then it remains close to conditions of existence:
Desire always remains in close touch with the conditions of objective existence; it embraces them and follows them, shifts when they shift, and does not outlive them. For that reason it so often becomes the desire to die.”[ix]
In describing how desire “so often becomes the desire to die,” Deleuze and Guattari hint at how they think about the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive which I briefly introduced in my previous essay. In their view, the kinds of self-destructive drives which characterize the so-called “death instinct” are evident of some sort of “shift” within “the conditions of objective existence.”
Moreover, if desire is productive, social and close to the conditions of existence, then social production is never organized around a pre-existing lack; lack is never primary in social production. Rather, it is produced “as a function of market economy” and as “the art of a dominant class:”
Lack […] is created, planned, and organized in and through social production. […] It is never primary; production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack […] The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class.[x]
There point is about the way the capitalist economy “organiz[es] wants and needs […] amid an abundance of production. Consider the fact that we have more than enough available housing to house all homeless people in the US, and yet, amid capitalist economic relations, the general lack of housing is guaranteed.
As a productive force at the center of organizing social production and reproduction, and thus close to the conditions of existence, desire is essential to how our sense of reality is produced. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the real is the end product of desire as “the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production.”[xi]
Arguing that “[t]here is no particular form of existence that can be labeled “psychic reality,’” Deleuze and Guattari differentiate themselves from, among others, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who had defined the Real in opposition to the Symbolic elements of the unconscious (fantasies, dreams, etc.). However, the same criticism directly applies to Harari’s dualistic logic of two realities in which humans inhabit, one imaginary, the other objective.
Deleuze and Guattari’s logic of desire as a principle of social production is fundamental to the social and political form of psychoanalysis by which they aim to study the origins of fascism:
Even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduction are produced by desire within the organization that is the consequence of such production under various conditions that we must analyze.[xii]
Regarding the rise of fascism, Deleuze and Guattari thus argue that ideology and propaganda aren’t enough to explain the cause: “no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.”[xiii]
Completely contrary to this logic about the social context for a desire for fascism is Harari’s notion that imagined orders shape our desires; and Harari indeed applies his idealistic conception of desire in the way he thinks about the rise of fascism.
In a previous essay, I discussed a passage from Sapiens wherein Harari argues against “the materialist school” of history, claiming that we have enough cultural artifacts to know that WWII was not started by economic factors. However, how exactly in Harari’s view does something like fascist ideology take hold in the first place?
While Harari doesn’t elaborate on the ideological factors in the cause of WWII—the weight of the evidence of which he claims exceeds that of material factors—the implication is obviously that fascist ideology was the primary driver in causing the war. Several chapters later in Sapiens, Harari discusses Nazism, but only from the perspective of the internal logic of Nazism itself; not from the perspective of how or why one might embrace Nazism in the first place.
That kind of explanation from Harari, I did find elsewhere, however, in a couple of YouTube videos. Unlike Deleuze and Guattari who emphasize the conditions of objective existence and the suicidal nature of fascism, Harari emphasizes the way in which fascistic nationalism is self-flattering, how it makes people feel good about themselves by telling them they are superior.
Harari on the appeal of fascism
Given his popularity and status, there’s no shortage of videos on the Internet of Harari speaking. Hence, despite my disagreeing with him on many important issues, I don’t really mind if his videos get a few more views as a result of this article—I’ll link two for you here to peruse.
The first video, “Why fascism is so tempting -- and how your data could power it,” as the title suggests, is where you’ll find his views on what draws people to fascism.
The second video is the one I want to comment on a bit further here, where he discusses with Mark Zuckerberg the causes of extremism in society—the exchange begins at about almost 20 minutes into the video, FYI, and last about 10 minutes.
In summary:
Zuckerberg repeatedly makes the point that social and economic factors drive extremism.
(Let’s set aside the fact that the conversation took place in a context in which Zuckerberg had an interest in distancing Facebook’s potential role in causing the spread of extremism online—what I’m interested in is Harari’s response to Zuckerberg’s arguments.)
Harari brings up the example of Nazis and how there’s many examples in history of people who feel good about themselves and yet do terrible things—the kind of argument he was makes in his video on “Why fascism is so tempting.”
Zuckerberg counters that WWII was driven by economic factors—a general version of the argument Harari argues against in Sapiens.
Harari responds by suggesting they set aside the "extreme example," and he brings up British Colonialism.
Zuckerberg then explains that there’s a difference between British Colonialism where the ideology in question is dominant in society versus the kind of fringe extremism he’s talking about. Zuck then elaborates for minutes, silencing Harari who fidgets a bit and hesitatingly bobs his head.
Harari responds with some point about concern over regional inequality over control over Information Tech.
I was astonished—Harari didn’t even push back against Zuckerberg’s argument about the economic factors being primary in WWII. Harari’s key argument against “the materialist school” in Sapiens is bolstered with a bold claim about WWII in particular, and yet, he sets it aside here as the “extreme example.”
Some of the principle ideas of Sapiens were challenged directly to Harari’s face—not by a fellow historian or a philosopher, for example, but by a tech CEO—and he didn’t push back.
Why wouldn't he respond and emphasize the superior weight of evidence of ideological factors?
Enjoy!
Notes
[i]. Harari, Sapiens (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 32.
[ii]. Ibid, 114.
[iii]. Ibid, 115.
[iv]. Ibid.
[v]. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Penguin, 2009), 25.
[vi]. Ibid, 4, 5.
[vii]. Ibid, 27.
[viii]. Ibid, 29, 63.
[ix]. Ibid, 27.
[x]. Ibid, 28.
[xi]. Ibid, 26.
[xii]. Ibid, 29.
[xiii]. Ibid.