Hu Yaohui: Deleuze's Theory of Affect and His Critique of Capitalism
In 1995, the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins" and Brian Massumi’s "The Autonomy of Affect" heralded the "affective turn" in Western academia of the 20th century. Today, discussions regarding affect involve almost every field of the humanities. In the introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth summarized eight primary research directions for affect theory—namely, the philosophy of technology, biopolitics, gender studies, psychoanalysis, political research, linguistic studies, the history of emotions, and the philosophy of science—demonstrating its interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional character. Affect theory stands in opposition to nearly all mainstream paradigms; it not only opposes traditional rationalism and the philosophy of subjectivity but also refuses to align with various postmodern paradigms (such as structuralism, linguistic semiotics, and psychoanalysis) that likewise oppose traditional philosophy. Precisely for this reason, it provides contemporary critical theorists with a brand-new weapon to awaken the bodies and lives that have been deliberately repressed by the Western capitalist production machine.
This article focuses on the most important theoretical source of the affective turn—the affect theory of Gilles Deleuze. The article will first follow Deleuze’s unique interpretation of the history of philosophy to examine its core agenda of using Spinozian philosophy to oppose Hegelian philosophy. In order to construct a world distinct from Hegel’s totalizing dialectics, it is necessary to simultaneously explain the "ground of the world" and the "becoming of the world." Deleuze uses Spinoza’s "doctrine of expression" to explain the former, while his affect theory is a detailed elaboration of the latter. Next, the article will use "power, affect, and desire" as a thread to provide a detailed reading of the world-picture depicted by Deleuze’s affect theory, as well as how he developed a brand-new philosophy with clear political implications based on the concept of affect, eventually pointing toward the fundamental question of political liberation. Finally, through a reading of works such as Anti-Oedipus, the article will demonstrate the critique of contemporary capitalism contained within his affect theory. While affirming that affect theory provides a new theoretical horizon for our understanding of contemporary capitalism’s new forms of control, the article will also point out where the gap lies between it and authentic Marxism.
I. The Origins of Affect: Hegelianism and Spinoza
Michael Hardt once pointed out: "Baruch Spinoza is the thinker who pushed affect theory the furthest. Directly or indirectly, his thought is the source for most of the contemporary work in this field." In the 1960s, a surge of interest in Spinozian studies emerged in France and rapidly spread to other countries on the European continent. Deleuze’s first major work on Spinoza, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, was published during this period. Almost simultaneously, Martial Gueroult, Bernard Rousset, and Alexandre Matheron also released monographs on Spinoza. This phenomenon was no accident; it was the result of a collective turn in the French theoretical world toward resistance against Hegelianism in the late 1960s. Michel Foucault explained this issue in an interview: in the 1960s, the philosophies available to young people were either the officially recognized systematic philosophy of Hegel or the phenomenology and existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty outside the academy. Hegelianism permeated all theories, but this theory ultimately led to the recognition of historical reason [1], and the new generation of scholars did not want this conservative and passive philosophy. Ultimately, the social movements of 1968 accelerated the demise of Hegelian philosophy, and emerging philosophers turned their gaze toward difference and rupture; they yearned to "become a completely different other in a completely different world."
Hegelianism occupied an absolutely dominant position in post-war France. It is generally believed that this stemmed primarily from the seminars on The Phenomenology of Spirit held by Alexandre Kojève in the 1930s; most of those who attended these seminars later became prominent figures in the French intellectual world. The greatest legacy Kojève left to French academia was an anthropological interpretation of the evolution of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. By focusing on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Kojève interpreted the adventures of consciousness depicted by Hegel as the actual historical development of the Master and the Slave. This interpretation set a goal for the "end of history," wherein man's self-perfection in time eventually overcomes the negativity of history and enters a classless society of mutual recognition. In this "universal and homogeneous state," there is no longer a struggle between master and slave or affirmation and negation; it is thus an ultimate state—the ideal and goal proposed for politics by the philosophy of "our age." From a practical perspective, the Hegelian philosophy of history could provide a defense for the post-war Soviet Union, which aligned with the political ideals of French leftist intellectuals at that time. However, as the outcome for the Eastern and Western camps in the Cold War became increasingly clear, this defense was challenged. In short, a totalizing historical dialectic shrouded the entire psyche of post-war European intellectuals. One need only look at how, in the writings of Sartre—who was famous for emphasizing absolute individual freedom—individual action ultimately forms a totalizing historical momentum within the organic group to understand the immense influence exerted by Hegel’s philosophy of history. Merleau-Ponty also believed: "In the past century, Hegel is the source of all the great things achieved by philosophy... He opened up an exploration, exploring in detail how to integrate the irrational into an expanded rationality, which remains the task of our century... To explain Hegel is to take a position on all the philosophical, political, and religious problems solved in our century."
Deleuze’s teacher, Louis Althusser, was the first to stand up and use Spinoza against Hegel, an approach that broadened Deleuze’s theoretical horizon. The difference was that Althusser’s critique of Hegelianism was limited to historicism, whereas Deleuze used Spinoza to subvert the entire philosophical foundation of Hegel. The affect theory he derived through Spinoza simultaneously opposed dialectics and negativity, constructing a brand-new, affirmative, non-dialectical philosophy. Deleuze was not a researcher of the history of philosophy in the traditional sense; the research he conducted did not follow any "Great Tradition." Instead, through the re-interpretation of thinkers often regarded as "outsiders"—such as Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Henri Bergson—he demonstrated the conceptual creation of his own philosophy. Therefore, whether Deleuze’s interpretation based on Spinoza’s concept of affect follows Spinoza himself is not important; what matters is how this interpretation endowed Spinoza with the vitality to resist traditional philosophy (especially Hegelianism), thereby "producing a profound affirmation of life, the cultivation of joy, and the appreciation of power/capacity (能力)."
Deleuze first treated Spinoza as a critic of René Descartes, finding the path to subverting Hegel only after solving the Cartesian problem. In Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, the Cartesian problem begins with the question of God as "cause of itself" (causa sui). The most famous aspect of Cartesian philosophy is its principle of subjectivity, but this principle is not self-sufficient; the question of the existence of God as the ultimate ground still requires proof. This is the fundamental malady of modern philosophy, which Martin Heidegger called "onto-theology." Descartes provided two proofs for God in the "Third Meditation" and "Fifth Meditation." The former is based on God as the efficient cause of all things—a causal proof; the latter is based on God as an absolute power (权能) beyond entering into causality. However, this precisely exposed the contradiction between God as creator and Nature as created. For if God also existed within the causal sequence of Nature, it would negate His supernatural essence. Descartes’ doctrine of the "creation of eternal truths" most clearly embodies this paradox: he believed that eternal truths such as mathematics are equally valid in all worlds created by God, yet he also admitted that God has the right to make mathematical truths invalid. Descartes had to rely on the assertion that "the cause of God's existence comes from Himself" (i.e., causa sui) to maintain the fragile balance of his world-picture. Deleuze pointed out that Descartes’ concept of causa sui is contradictory; God is cause of Himself only in an analogical sense, rather than representing necessity within the natural sequence. Deleuze explained: "God is cause of Himself in the sense that His essence is His formal cause; His essence is considered the formal cause—this is an analogical statement rather than a direct identity, meaning that the role God plays in His own existence is analogous to the role the efficient cause plays in its effects."
In Deleuze’s view, Spinoza solved the problem opened by Descartes through the doctrine of "expression" (exprimer). In Spinoza’s philosophy, "to say that God is the cause of Himself is the same as saying that God is the cause of all things." Deleuze depicted Spinozian expressionism as a world of immanence where causality and causa sui are completely fused; there is no essential difference between God as the expresser and all things as the expressed. God must be expressed in the attributes, and the attributes are expressed in the modes; therefore, the existence of God as causa sui and the production of God are one and the same. The formal cause and the efficient cause thus coincide. "This expression provides a proof, namely the immediate manifestation of the absolutely infinite substance."
However, the real problem was only beginning; solving Descartes' causa sui was only the first step. What Deleuze truly had to face was Hegel, who had established a complete philosophical system. If Descartes’ problem was the ground of the world, Hegel’s problem was the subject; "substance is subject" is the entire principle of Hegelian philosophy. Hegel placed Spinoza within the tradition of rationalism, believing that while Spinoza solved the problem of the ground of God's existence, he did not unfold the self-movement of causa sui—that is, the other side of "substance is subject": the dialectical movement of the world’s negativity. Hegel criticized Spinozism as "acosmism" [2]—a "philosophy that insists on the existence of God, and insists that only God exists." Because "Spinoza did not define God as the unity of God and the world, but recognized God as the unity of thought and extension (the material world)," his system "only recognizes this world as appearance, without actual reality." In other words, the existing world does not "reflect" the Absolute Spirit. Viewed accordingly, in Spinoza’s metaphysics, only the universal and non-particularized is real; the subjective and individual lack reality. "Only God is the sole substance; nature and the world, in Spinoza’s words, are merely modifications or modes of substance, not substantial things," and are thus "non-individual."
As mentioned previously, resisting the suffocating doctrine of Hegelianism was the mission of Deleuze and his generation of scholars. To solve the Hegelian problem, Deleuze continued to deepen Spinoza's "doctrine of expression" and unfolded his affect theory. Standing on a theoretical position opposite to Hegel, Deleuze’s affect theory attempts to construct the becoming and change of a non-dialectical, affirmative world.
II. The World-Picture of Affect: Power, Affect, and Desire
The first step toward affect theory is "interpreting absolute substance as an infinite power (力量) possessing both infinite activity and infinite passivity." Only thus could Deleuze coherently explain the essential reality of the modes within immanence. Deleuze’s affective world takes "dynamism" (力论) as its ontological basis. Spinoza said: "The power (potentia) of God is the essence of God itself." Martin Saar summarized: "To know what a thing is, is to know its power. Its power belongs to itself, because power is precisely what it is. In this sense, power is an ontological concept." That is to say, power is not something possessed by a being, but the sole essence that defines and elucidates existence. However, to a certain extent, the externalization of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit can also be explained by the externalization of power. Therefore, a more crucial question is: how does this externalization reveal an affirmative world without teleology, rather than the negative movement of Spirit?
The decisive step comes from the foundation of power [3], treating all things and modes as "self-affections (affectiones) of infinite power." Thus, Deleuze enters the world of affect. Deleuze was fully aware of Hegel’s critique of Spinoza. In a 1974 seminar, he asked: "If I say being is univocal, then what is the difference between beings?" His answer was: the differences in univocal being can only be measured by degrees of power. This is a novel way of thinking: the difference between a table, a girl, and a train lies only in their different degrees of power, rather than in differences of category, genus, or function. For Deleuze, what matters is not searching for the essence behind a thing, because the magnitude of power is always changing. Just as the protagonist in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis can turn into a beetle, the important thing is to explore the intensive differences between one thing and another in a fluid and relational sense.
Intensive difference is manifested as a difference in the capacity to be affected (i.e., affectio). Deleuze distinguished two types of "power" in Spinoza: he argued that all power (potentia) must correspond to a capacity to be affected (potesta). The distinction between potentia and potesta did not receive much attention in Spinoza, but Deleuze uses the two to understand the fundamental difference between things. The essence of a thing is power; power is "active and actual action," yet it is limited by the corresponding capacity to be affected. Since things are in relation to others at every moment, the capacity to be affected increases or decreases the power of action within the various modes of affection. Therefore, although the amount of a body's power cannot be determined, according to the rule that "a mode at any given moment is all that it can do," Deleuze believes one can understand the intensive differences possessed by different things through the capacity to be affected that is actualized in different assemblages. It is precisely in the comparison and variation of the intensive differences of things that the whole of nature reveals endless possibilities.
Therefore, the movement of intensity is affect (affectus). Affect is the change of state when objects/bodies with different capacities to be affected encounter one another. This encounter results in two consequences: the body and the external object either merge or repel one another; the former produces an affect of joy, while the latter produces an affect of sorrow—both are passions. Emotion/feeling and affect are often conflated in contemporary research, but Deleuze pointed out that the two are different. Affect operates at a more fundamental level that cannot be recognized or grasped, much like a kind of raw material waiting to be processed; emotion, on the other hand, is a product of social processing. To borrow Kantian language to describe the relationship between the two, all emotion is always accompanied by affect. Just as infrared light is not the opposite of red, non-conceptual affect does not conflict with conceptual emotion; affect suggests the intensive limit of emotion. In this sense, Spinoza was the first philosopher to call the concept of the subject into question. Deleuze noted: "Spinoza actually precisely wanted to define the essence of man in an intensive way, treating it as a certain quantity of intensity." Life is an affect full of intensity.
Spinoza further described affect as "affections of the body," arguing that "these affections increase or diminish, assist or restrain the power of action of the body, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections." Affect is passively synthesized at the unconscious level, and then forms representations at the level of active synthesis. When the mind feels an affect of joy, it produces a more perfect idea, thereby increasing the body's power of action; when the mind feels sorrow, it produces an imperfect idea, leading to a decrease in the body's power of action. We call the idea triggered by joy "love," and the idea triggered by sorrow "hate." Joy seems better than sorrow, but since we are in relation to other things at every moment, passivity always accompanies us. Thus, the question of what a body can actively do becomes the core problem of Spinoza’s Ethics.
To answer this question, we must understand the influences on Deleuze’s affect across two dimensions: longitude and latitude. "Latitude is composed of intensive parts under a capacity, just as longitude is composed of extensive parts in a relation." Longitude signifies the trans-individuality and sociality of the body, while latitude signifies the possibility for the body to increase or decrease in intensity. Therefore, a truly active affect needs to change in two aspects simultaneously: on the one hand, one must recognize the singular intensity one possesses, or the unique power that distinguishes one, which in Spinoza’s view belongs to the third kind of knowledge—knowledge obtained through direct cognition of one's own inner essence; Deleuze believes this means knowledge is not just knowledge, but a mode of existence and a way of life [4]. On the other hand, one must strive to create new connections, allowing the body to transcend the limits of the capitalist state apparatus and shape new relations, which Deleuze calls "becoming-animal." This does not mean a person literally turns into an animal, but rather breaking through anthropocentric modes of thought to provide a new way of thinking. Deleuze’s philosophy develops both of these perspectives simultaneously.
From this, one can see that the subject-object problem in the narrative of the history of philosophy is replaced by Spinoza’s problem of affect-becoming. The unity of subject and object, of thought and extension, signifies a "continuous flow of the power of existence or the power of action" in the sense of psycho-physical parallelism. The constant encounters between the body and various objects form the world; the change of the body from state I to state II breaks the limitations of subjectivity and essentialism. The body has no essence, only a process of changing intensity of power. The body is affect; therefore, affect is another name for becoming. If Hegel represents the logical dead-end of rationalism, Spinoza completely opens up a non-predetermined world of difference.
At this point, the world-picture of affect is basically complete; the final puzzle piece is "desire." The state of existence in which we maintain our own power of action is a conscious action; without the concept of desire as the drive for our actions, affect would become entirely passive. To understand this using Kant’s famous dictum: desire without affect is empty, and affect without desire is blind. The concept of desire comes from Spinoza’s concept of "conatus" (effort), defined as: "The effort (conatus) by which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself." When humans become aware of this deep drive from within themselves, effort is called desire. If affect and power describe the formal cause of the world’s existence, then desire is the efficient cause of the world’s existence. As Deleuze said, the doctrine of desire is a doctrine of dynamics stripped of all ultimate references. Unlike the concepts of desire in Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Deleuze treats desire as a tireless self-revolution rather than a lack. Of course, this does not mean desire always gets what it wants; the production of desire must remain consistent with social production, because it is determined within specific social assemblages. Therefore, the contradiction between the revolutionary nature of desire and the territorialization of the capitalist production machine becomes the basic principle of Deleuze's analysis of capitalist social reality.
Power, desire, and affect demonstrate the basic model of Deleuze’s world-picture. In this world, we see no subjects, only intensities; no reason, only passions; no analogies, only relations; no negation, only affirmation; no dialectics, only becoming. Clearly, Deleuze’s theory of affect not only responds to Hegel’s critique but also constructs a brand-new philosophical mode. For Deleuze, the question regarding the ground of the world is far less important than the question regarding the becoming of the world; the negativity and transcendence insisted upon by Hegelian philosophy are replaced by an affirmative, non-dialectical world. Hegel’s question is: How is the world sublated (aufgehoben)? Deleuze’s question is: How does the world generate the new?
First, ontologically, Deleuze replaces the operation of negative dialectics with an affirmative, non-dialectical becoming, standing entirely in opposition to Hegel’s critique. Hegel criticized Spinoza’s attributes and modes as "cropping up" (herauskommen), arguing there was a lack of internal developmental order from substance to mode. Deleuze, through the theory of affect, emphasizes the necessity and openness of becoming, arguing that affect is the movement of intensities of power and that all things in the world are processes; thus, there is no necessity for negation, because negation is nothing more than what is used to fill my capacity to be affected when my power of action decreases. Hegel’s world is driven by the negativity of the master-slave dialectic, meaning difference is destined to be resolved by contradiction, which excludes things that do not belong to the movement of reason at an essentialist level. However, Deleuze’s world has only potentiality and no identity; it affirms the potentiality of life itself, thus pointing toward a "line of flight" (ligne de fuite) from the totalizing system of the dialectic.
Thus, the world of affect escapes all predetermined teleology; the Hegelian philosophy of history established by Kojève is replaced by an open philosophy oriented toward the future. It requires neither a metaphysics of essences nor a mechanism of phenomena; we see no finality or pre-established harmony of moral significance among the modes, but rather a "necessary connection between different effects produced by an immanent cause." Consequently, many French scholars regard Spinoza as an important forerunner of materialism. In such a world, there is nothing other than the actual encounters of things and the effects they produce. Ideas do not take priority over the body, nor does the body determine ideas; in Marx’s words, thinking and being are always identical. Only materialism can properly account for the expressiveness and sufficiency of the world of affect.
Secondly, Deleuze’s world of affect emphasizes the relationality of the world. The world of affect eliminates all of Hegel’s determinations and categories, while also eliminating the closure of structure. For Deleuze, relation is primary; while opposing traditional philosophy, it also opposes the structuralism that has had a profound influence in France. In the world of affect, there is no thing that is not affected, nor is there any thing that does not exert influence; "all that is solid melts" into infinite relations. As Deleuze said: "What I can know will always only be mixed objects/bodies." The body is a complex; it stretches out in all directions of the world like a spider’s web, where the vibration of every thread brings a change to the whole. Because the threads of the web are infinite and the rhythms of their vibration possess infinite possibilities, the Body without Organs replaces Hegel’s organism. A relational world provides a new perspective for thinking about the operation of society. In terms of a relational world, our subjectivity and free will are nothing but a social illusion—they are secondary ideas formed after the occurrence of affect. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, although we are free, we are in chains. Therefore, the important thing is not to analyze society with some fixed structure, but to think about the possibility of an open, constantly changing, trans-individual society of passion.
The ethical picture of affect ultimately points toward a critique of contemporary politics. Deleuze’s political philosophy differs from the rationalist tradition pioneered by Thomas Hobbes and others. From Hobbes to Rousseau, and then to Hegel, there is an emphasis on the suppression of natural rights by law, viewing this as the attainment of moral universality through violence, intimidation, and prohibition. However, Spinoza is different; he opposes moral politics with ethics. He believes that the less one understands the laws of life, the more one is willing to use legal rules and obligations to restrict life; in fact, our political experience is not in conflict with affect. A political system that allows us to pursue joy and increase our self-power of action is a good polity; such politics focuses only on the motion and rest, the speed and slowness, and the movement of bodies. If Hegel views tragedy as the fundamental experience of the world, Spinoza believes exactly the opposite: he believes that everything that makes us suffer, feel sorrow, envy, or hate is bad, so tragedy is tyranny. Ethics and politics share the same source in this sense; Spinoza can thus also be seen as the source of Nietzsche’s doctrine of "beyond good and evil." So-called moral evaluations of good and evil are merely value orientations within specific social assemblages; the difference between the weak and the strong lies only in the strength or weakness of their power of action.
Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of affect ultimately culminates in a fundamental political question: "Why do people fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" This is the political version of the question "what can a body do?" Spinoza points out in the Theologico-Political Treatise that the stimulation of sad passions is necessary for the exercise of power; the tyrant, like the priest, requires the miserable passions of the common people. Today’s capitalist mode of production is both priest and tyrant. If one wishes to truly create an ideal city-state, one must utilize the theory of affect to perform a de-territorialization of the territorialization of capitalism, liberating the society of control into a radical nomadic becoming.
III. The Affective Critique of Capitalism
The capitalism described by Deleuze is the new form of capitalism since the second half of the 20th century. Due to the development of post-Fordism, compared to the era in which Marx lived, immaterial production such as images, signs, and affects has become a vital object of production for the current logic of capital. In the words of Antonio Negri, the formal subsumption of labor by capital has transformed into real subsumption. Within this context, "cynicism" and "piety" are the two primary affects, representing two contradictory aspects of contemporary capitalism.
On one hand, contemporary capitalism has liberated the encoded flows of desire. Deleuze notes: "This cynical age is the age of capital accumulation—an age that means combining all decoded and de-territorialized flows." Just as Marx and Engels stated in the Communist Manifesto: "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned." In the age of cynicism, capital’s sole concern is its own valorization. Money, as the general equivalent, possesses only an abstract value-form; the qualitative differences inherent in things are forcibly leveled beneath exchange value. To achieve a total appropriation of society, new forms of production extract energy from personal life, and spheres of daily life such as emotion are permeated by production. Within the universality of production, life and work become indistinguishable; everyone is a member of the exploited proletariat, and any subjective characteristics that manifest one’s humanity are ultimately channeled into the productive trap of the "consuming person." Thus, desire is not a product of individual fantasy, but a collective investment of social production. In today’s consumer society and biopolitics, people no longer care about anything except profit and accumulation. Desire becomes numbed and indifferent; joy and pain become inconspicuous in the new social spectacle, and there is nothing novel that cannot be incorporated into the daily game of consumption. If the body was once able to feel changes in affect, in present-day capitalist society it has lost this fundamental potential. Seemingly open and constantly changing bodily connections have not created objects or lives distinct from commodification; the body’s power of action (potentia) has not been liberated but has instead fallen into a state of total indifference.
On the other hand, the affect of piety establishes new territories within society to capture the flows of desire liberated by cynicism. Piety is the result of the "family machine" in capitalist society, which follows the Oedipal structure of "Father—Mother—Me." In Deleuze’s view, the privatized reproduction carried out by the family performs a depoliticized and privatized representation of the fluidity of social production. The family is a man-made god, a religion for modern man that has replaced mystery religions, with the father as the autocrat. Deleuze analyzes a classic case from Freudian psychoanalysis, arguing that psychoanalysis deliberately erases the social and historical fields, eternalizing the historical family. In the famous case of Judge Schreber [5], "delirium is expressed entirely in terms of races, history, and wars, while Freud leaves these things unanalyzed and exclusively reduces Judge Schreber’s delirium to his relationship with his father." Anti-Oedipus is thus a revolt against the false repression brought about by psychoanalysis; private individuality and the desire for the mother are merely false appearances triggered by the affect of piety.
Thus, the tension between indifferent cynicism and affect-laden piety shapes modern capitalism; all the intensities dissolved in social production are recovered within the family. Modern capitalism is a strange combination of extreme coldness and extreme hedonism. These two seemingly contradictory affects are actually "two sides of the same coin" [6], with piety defending cynicism. In the Oedipus complex, the exaltation of personal affairs shapes a false subjectivity; in the name of defending individual values, capitalism severs the true "common wealth," leading desire to be directed only toward the shallow spectacles of profit and consumption. The intensity of our body’s affects is determined by the gravity and repulsion between these two desiring machines. Paolo Virno provides a vivid example: a cinema projectionist finishes a hard day’s work and runs to watch a movie, then bursts into tears. The unique organizational mode of capitalism constantly introduces new axioms even as it provokes its own limits; complete de-territorialization is always out of reach. Therefore, while capitalism is its own gravedigger, it also constantly delays this occurrence.
When the religion of the family is seen through, capitalism develops new means of delay. Deleuze, in "Postscript on the Societies of Control," refers to such a society as a "society of control." Anti-Oedipus was published in 1972, while "Postscript on the Societies of Control" was written in 1992. The developments and changes in capitalism over those twenty years led Deleuze to a new judgment: if the antagonism between the family and capital characterized the "disciplinary society"—where the continuity of capital was partitioned into concrete social spaces like prisons, reformatories, and families—then in the neoliberal society of control, the control of mobility becomes the core of the production machine’s operation. In fact, we see a similar turn in Foucault’s discourses on biopolitics in the late 1970s. Foucault argued that contemporary configurations of power greatly encourage the circulation of goods and populations. The society of control finds the affect of "cynicism" to be unstoppable; the family has long been integrated into the process of globalization, so it turns around to hypocritically embrace fluidity, using digital technology and computers to transform capitalism from a mole stably residing in its burrow into a snake moving everywhere. Deleuze says: "Individuals have become 'dividuals,' and masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks'." The "dividual" is the new mode of the individual. Previously, to restrain the production of desire, capitalism had to use the family to create a false individuality; the development of information technology makes the monitoring of flows possible. Data, samples, markets, and banks are all "dividual" forms of the human being. Consequently, no matter how the flow of desire creates new connections, the society of control can "determine the position of any element... its lawful or unlawful place... a universal modulation." Thus, punishment is replaced by modulation, the factory becomes the corporation, and flexible working methods replace fixed spatial decomposition. The Oedipal family has not so much vanished as reappeared in another guise.
If the family shaped piety, then the society of control, as Foucault noted, triggers the affect of "fear." The neoliberal society of control is a mixture of hubris and caution: on one hand, it instigates games of freedom; on the other, it broadcasts the dangers of the world. It seemingly encourages laissez-faire, but in reality, it is merely following the protocols of economic rationality. Aside from constantly increasing investment in capital markets, people no longer perform any truly courageous acts. The only way the world encounters us is through probability; in uncertain encounters, people are filled with a pre-empirical fear of the world. Fear is the prerequisite for the establishment of the neoliberal society of control.
To thoroughly break free from the capitalist production machine, Deleuze believes it is necessary to find affects that make our joy unrestricted—for example, turning the body into a "war machine" to maximize one's own power of existence and power of action. Deleuze concludes: "The mechanism of the war machine is the mechanism of affect, which relates only to moving bodies themselves, to speeds and compositions of speeds between elements... Affects are like weapons, they are projective; while feelings are like tools, they are introjective." Historically, the war machine is the nomad struggling against the state apparatus; in life, the war machine is the schizophrenic who remains outside the discursive system; in the society of control, the war machine consists of the "minority" paupers. "Capitalism keeps the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity as a constant: control will have to deal not only with the erosion of borders but with explosions in shanty towns or minority ghettos." The affect of the war machine summons the multitude.
In short, Deleuze’s critique of capitalism is closely linked to his theory of affect; we can discover the hidden dimensions of contemporary capitalist production through his affective analysis. Cynicism, piety, and fear are not the results of production, but rather the political ontology of capitalism. By absorbing pre-subjective affects, capital forms a state of fundamental bodily submissiveness. The affective critique of capitalism makes us realize the importance of developing a materialist theory of desire. This is a creative reading of Marxism that urges us to seek out the state apparatuses that regulate desire and to try to understand the falsity of the worldviews we take for granted, thereby helping us recognize the new forms of current capitalist development, whether we call such a society biopolitics or a consumer society. However, it should also be noted that Deleuze’s critique of capitalism is clearly too abstract. Without touching upon the system of ownership and relations of production based on wage labor, no liberation can be spoken of; fundamental change will merely dwindle into an aesthetic pursuit of art and literature. How a society full of difference is organized, and how the Body without Organs can answer questions of intersubjectivity and social norms—these are our questions for Deleuze’s theory of affect.
(Author: Hu Yaohui, School of Marxism, Renmin University of China)