ACFM - #ACFM Trip 14: Desire

Episode Date: February 14, 2021

Nadia Idle, Keir Milburn and Jeremy Gilbert explore the political power of desire from the storming of the Capitol to the millenarian strands of Corbynism, with music from Portishead and the Au Pairs. Music: Portishead – Glory Box / Tricky – Makes Me Wanna Die / Alton McClain & Destiny – Crazy Love / Alternative […]

Hello, you're listening to the podcast version of ACFM on Navarra Media. And on the podcast version of this show, you'll get the stimulating and mind-expanding discussion from our hosts, but you won't get the music. That's because of the way writes and licenses work in the digital age. So you're really only getting half the picture, but there is an easy way to fix that. If you head over to the Navaramedia.com website, you can stream the full show. It's easy enough just to follow the link in the description of this podcast. Otherwise, enjoy the standalone discussion in this episode of ACFF. Welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and today we're joined as usual by Keir Milburn. Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert.

Hello. And on today's episode, we're talking about desire. So, guys, why are we talking about desire today? Keir, I think you should introduce this first. The most, the most, straightforward, that reason why we're talking about desire is we're aiming for this to come out on Valentine's Day. And so it's just a cheap sort of publicity stunt. There are some sort of more conjunctural reasons why we might want to talk about desire. When people normally talk about desire, I think they're having their heads, the heads will automatically go to erotic desire. But we're also interested in desire in a sort of wider sense, I think. So we're also interested in desire which connects in a much more straightforward way with politics.

And we can think of a few different elements of what's going on at the moment, in which we might want to think about desire in a political sense, about how we need to think about things such as desire in order to get a grip on why events are taking the shape they are. One of the things we might want to talk about and perhaps talk about a bit later is, was the Corbyn cult real? Why is it so hard to move on from Corbinism? and why so many people seem to be really invested in a figure of Corbyn,

or perhaps, you know, the Labour, the project of the Labour Party under Corbyn. The other thing we need to work out is that right-wing politics is bloody weird at the minute, right? It's taking really very strange shapes. You know, how do we account with something like Brexit, which seems to, you know, go beyond sort of economic rationality? We're talking, you know, a few days after the Trump-inspired riot around the Senate occupation of the Senate building, and lots of the people involved in that are involved in things such as the Q&ON conspiracy movement we talked about when we talked about the cosmic right,

there just seems to be it's very hard to account for that sort of thing without some sort of recourse to ideas around desire. Before we even try to approach any of those sorts of discussions, we probably have to talk about what we mean by desire, and that's a big discussion, I think. I mean, we're talking here about we can't exactly map this onto the word, you know, want. What we're talking about here is individuals and populations who like want something or striving for something. And what are the conditions that that create that and how that kind of desire manifests itself in terms of political realities and actions and movements on the street, right? So it's it's trying to, for me, one of the big questions is trying to understand

the drive and how those drives manifest itself if it is in fact a drive when we talk about it politically like it's the thing that moves things that's that's what that's what I think about when I think about desire and that's why I really like the discussion that I had with Tabitha on the the microdose that we did that should go alongside this full episode on desire as some kind of, having movement in it, and action and kind of forward-looking, which is why, of course, I think any actors or groups or people on the left should be interested in desire. Like, what is that movement and what are the politics around it? I guess when we're talking about desire, we're talking always about the unconscious to some

extent or the irrational or the more than rational or less than rational in some sense. Because when you want something, when something is wanted, then there's a certain rationality to it. You know, I want a biscuit because it's sweet and tasty or because I'm hungry. If I desired a biscuit, there's something more going on. But one way you might try to think about this is there have been a couple of sort of waves in which left politics or Marxism in particular has sort of connected with psychoanalysis as a way to try and get at this problem of desire.

the first sort of wave is probably just after the Second World War and the thing people are trying to come to terms with is how did fascism happen? What's going on there? And then the second sort of wave of concern of Marxism turns to psychoanalysis and then wider sorts of theories about desire is probably after the failure of the 1968 events, revolution, cycle of struggle, something like that.

And in fact, that probably that 1968 turned to thinking about desire is also tied up with the birth of mass. assumption and the effects that has on society. And so it is this question of like, you know, why do we want certain things? Why do we desire certain things, which gets us to one of these big problems or one of these, this question that keeps on emerging right throughout history, actually, and we could take it back to Spinoza. So Spinoza says, why do people fight for their own servitude as though it's their salvation,

right? And then, you know, this comes up with Wilhelm Reich as well, who uses this to talk about fascism, you know, in the, well, just before the Second World War, actually, during the rise of fascism. And his argument is this, is that, like, we can't just understand this as people who've got false consciousness or who have just got had the wrong information. And if we give them the right information, they wouldn't have chosen this. Wilhelm Wright says, no, people became fascist because they desired it. It fulfilled some certain desires in them. You know, that's the only way to sort of explain QAnon. There's a certain structure of desire on the contemporary right

and Q&on fulfills some of that, you know. And obviously, in the week when a bunch of crazy people were dressed as Vikings have tried to storm the American capital because they believed a load of weird stuff they read on the internet, that is an interestingly relevant set of questions as well as it being, hopefully, when this goes out, Valentine's Day. We could have said we're going to do a show about the unconscious or about the irrational or something, actually, and they probably would have ended up talking about the same set of questions to some extent. I think it's interesting that you describe the people who stormed capital as, or, you know, QN on a lot or whatever, as crazy, because I think that's a big theme that comes up with desire.

I mean, I'm not sure, I think politically I wouldn't call them crazy, because I think when we call, especially right-wing groups, crazy, then it absorbs them as some kind of agency or responsibility. It doesn't mean that we don't think the theories are crazy, but that's a slightly tangential point. What I wanted to say was that the craziness linked with desire as a craze, as in being out of your mind because of uncontrolled desire for, you know, social change or, you know, out of love or obsession is a very strong association with desire.

And that structure of desire is about, you know, basically escaping from the overwhelming real, real problems facing us. There's definitely a sort of infantilizing sort of desire around the whole Q&N thing. It's to do with like trying to erect problems which seem absolutely outrageous and motivating but are actually quite easy to solve in theory. Do you know how you solve the problem of Q&M? You do a sort of capture the flag thing around the capital building and then the world is everything is solved. Of course it's not.

You get inside. You realize, in fact, that's not where power lies. That's not, you know, this false problem you set up is not being solved and you're looking at 10 years in jail, etc. But them's the breaks. But in terms of like the capital building and this, you know, and the QAnon thing, there's reason involved in this, right? People are reasoning this thing out, but we cannot just explain that in terms of the structure of reason. Like, we have to account for the fact that why reason has gone in that direction. How come people can ignore all of this evidence that points in the other way and fall down these rabbit

holds? Can we take a step back and talk again about this question of why do people desire their own servitude? Because I never understood that as a statement. The way I would see it is people make decisions and choices and have desires that work against their interests. So that I understand. And I would say, you know, there are structural reasons for that because there are stories and there are narrative beliefs that are formed that in case those desires and are easier to understand kind of story or narrative. But I don't quite understand the concept that people desire their own servitude. Can we unpack that a little bit? Because on a conscious level, people are not desiring their own servitude, are they? Are they saying I want to be in a

worse off position? I mean, nobody thinks that, surely. No, no, that's not what it means. No, It means that people will like cheer and wave a flag like for the queen, for the monarchy, even though the monarchy is just a system of... It doesn't work for them. It's the apex of a system of which they are described literally as subjects. And people like it. People like it being subjects. And that means subject, not in the sense of the active agent,

but in the sense of someone who is subjected to an external authority. So there obviously is at some basic level, a certain masochistic, a kind of masochism in that desire for authority over you, which is real in people. But isn't that related to order, as in you can desire that if you see that as the absence of the lack of that being the absence of order?

Well, that would be the debate, yeah. Someone who is completely skeptical about any sort of psychoanalytic account of what's going on there would indeed say, look, what they're actually celebrating and celebrating the Queen, is the state which provides order and which guarantees their prosperity

and guarantees they won't get murdered in their bed. I mean, that would be a sort of Hobbesian, actually, alternative in some ways, purely psychoanalytic explanation. And there's definitely something to that. But the extent to which people get emotionally invested in those kinds of symbols and signs, even when they obviously don't really serve any particular interest of theirs, is pretty obvious. I mean, obviously lots of people do.

I think desiring your own, impression you're right, it's a slightly confusing formulation. I mean, that is the right. That's what I think, yeah. It's the Reich formulation that Donozo and Khosori borrow. I mean, the actual, I mean, Spinoza is writing in Latin, so you could quibble over the translation anyway. But the translation is people fight for their own servitude. And he's talking about people fighting. He's talking about people really in very late feudal societies fighting for their lords, you know,

the people to whom their relationship is basically a little better than that of slaves. And, you know, it's a question which applies to any situation in which people are sort of patriotic, despite the fact that their society is organised in such a way that it benefits other people much more than it benefits them. And it relates to, you know, the extreme example is people going and getting themselves killed in wars for the sake of patriotism, for the sake of their loyalty to a political class or a set of institutions or an idea of country that doesn't really include them in any material sense. But how would that map onto the Spanish Civil War, for example, in terms of a left example,

the kind of desire to be part of a, you know, part of a greater kind of left cause. Isn't that the same? Well, historically, this is the debate, isn't it? So there are two ways through this, and one is the classical kind of Marxian way through this, which would be to say, well, that's not the same. That's not sort of unconscious desire expressing itself. That's a rational, scientific, class consciousness expressing itself, which is different, which doesn't really have this irrational dimension.

And that is something that produces a real tension, actually, I think, in the various attempts to theorise this. So the history of attempts to theorise this from the left perspective, they all proceed from the 19th century assumption, which I think Marx shares with people like Adam Smith, really, that people are basically economically rational agents, and therefore, sooner or later, that most people will become a socialist and will act accordingly.

And it's really, it's after the First World War, I think it's even before the rise of fascism, that it becomes a real problem for Marxism. It becomes a real problem for socialists that it's quite clear that despite it being patently not the rational thing to do, not the economically rational thing to do, people will go into the trenches behind the flags of their imperial overlords and murder other workers and not make socialist revolution. My read on this has always been, I mean, most of sort of Marxist theory, most of Western Marxism and ideology theory after that is trying to figure out, well, why the hell are they doing

that. Why is that going on? And then there's a tradition which draws on Freud. Freud is a really obvious resource to go to to, to draw on because Freud claims to be offering a science of the unconscious. But the problem is, and it's a problem we talked about last time, actually, when we talked about crowds. The problem is Freud is pretty skeptical that you can have any form of collective agency that isn't operating according to those irrational dynamics, those inherently authoritarian dynamics, etc. And then in the 60s, when people are trying to really what the political events by which the new theorists of desire are being motivated in the early 70s is the sequence which includes the events of 1968 but also the Communist

Party's lack of support for them. The Communist Party's lack of support for the counterculture and the students and sexual libertarianism and all this kind of stuff. And this sense in the early 70s this sort of intuition that various thinkers have and various actors have is that there's something more than just economic calculation which is motivating the utopian desire for a better society which is informing all of this stuff and it's something which official sort of Stalinist or Stalin adjacent Marxism can't recognize and that our politics of desire which wants to sort of set free the suppressed desire the desires which are suppressed by capitalism or the capitalism can only codify in consumerist terms and can only it can only

you realize by offering people stuff to buy, the setting free all those desires is a sort of revolutionary gesture. I mean, then you get into really complicated questions, which nobody can ever really properly resolve, actually. If desire is a revolutionary force, which is being contained and coded by consumerist capitalism, which actually we just want to set free, then what is the difference? What's actually the difference between us unleashing our desire and fascist unleashing their desire? And I would say basically what happens in the 70s is a lot of interesting stuff gets written by people like a little bit by Leotar, loads by people at Deleuze and Qatari, trying to sort of think through those questions. But I'm not

sure anybody ever comes up with a completely adequate sort of set of formulas for resolving them. But I would say there are basically two main conceptions of desire and what desire is, which get played out or which get drawn on in all those debates. And so there's an idea, which is central to the psychoanalytic understanding of what desire is, but which I think has a much older history running back through Christian ideas and even some ancient Greek ideas. And that is the idea that desire is an expression of lack. Desire is the sense of something being missing,

something that you have to try to, a feeling of lack that you have to overcome by achieving some kind of object. You're trying to fill a hole. Yeah, you're trying to fill a hole. Exactly. And of course, I mean, the problem is, the problem from any socially specificative is that Freud and his most loyal followers think that Hull could never be filled. You know, life is just a series of attempts to fill it. And the point of psychoanalysis is to get you to accept that it never really can be filled, but also to accept that you're never going to stop wishing that it could be.

And is Freud talking on what plane is Freud talking about to hear, or is it, is it, is he a general concept of desire? or is it on the kind of individual and relationship-based rather than sort of societal ones? Freud doesn't really think there is, there's any other, he's not interested in any other basis. When he talks about social phenomena, he sees them as extensions of individual phenomena. And then Delozing Guitari,

they draw on Spinoza's way of understanding, affect and pleasure and selfhood. And they're against this idea of lack. Their idea is that actually, it's capitalism that makes people experience themselves as subjects whose being is defined by a lack, a hole that can never be filled because it wants people to keep trying to fill it with bullshit, whether it's fascist bullshit or consumerist bullshit.

And the way I always put this is to say where Freud sees a whole, Delozo and Guittari see an opening. And they say, actually, the fact that we experience ourselves is sort of not complete self-contained subjects, but as beings who are defined by our interdependence and our interrelation with each other, with different parts of ourselves, with the whole rest of material existence, that is actually what produces all of the creative potential in us and in all of our collectivities as well. And they sort of borrowed this idea from Spinoza or a particular interpretation of Spinoza. And so for them, desire is conceptualized not as something which

is defined by what's missing, but desire becomes the name for the animating creative force, which drives everything, which drives the creative productivity of matter, but also of people, of collectives, of groups, and so desire becomes this productive force which emerges from bodies and from their relationships and from collectivities and groups is something which capitalism is always trying to capture and codify and turn into commodities and turn into well-defined social roles like husband, father, mother, child. And the point of the politics they're advocating for, at least in their book, Anteedibus, is to set desire and its productive capacities free from all of those limiting structures.

And that they see as allied to a sort of libertarian communism. A great song to play on the show, one of my absolute favorite disco-team, my Alton McLean and Destiny song called Crazy Love, which pretty much says it all. I mean, one reason it's hard to choose music for the show is because the theme of desire, like erotic desire, is just the central theme of pop music. And most pop music today, at least if you go by the lyrics and the kind of affect that it's trying to produce, I think, it hasn't really shifted much over the past 20 years. You know, there's a shift from, especially in the 90s, there's a shift from more traditional sort of, forms of romantic, you know, songs which are about kind of, they're basically for 13-year-old girls who were not yet really sexual, just sort of wistfully thinking about boys.

There's a shift from that into a kind of R&B-influenced mode of eroticism, I think, which is much more explicitly sexual, but it's still basically reproducing something which comes through, you know, most late 20th century pop music. And that is the idea that the normative form of the romantic relationship or the erotic relationship is a sort of slightly mad infatuation. There's this line in Nick Hornby's novel, High Fidelity, which I always liked, where he says, he talks about most of the songs he grew up listening to,

and most of the songs young people grow up listening to of his generation are about dysfunctional relationships. They're about unrequited love, or they're about obsession or betrayal. And he basically posits the possibility that this has a kind of unhealthy effect on people. It kind of educates, people have their desire, kind of imaginatively educated into this sort of neurotic patterns. I mean, that's not the language he uses. That's my language. And I certainly think that's true.

I think there's a certain ideology of romance that belongs to late capitalism. It's not the same as the old, it's not the kind of mid-20th century ideal of the nuclear family. It's what comes out of the breakdown of that. It's what comes down out of the breakdown of the ideology of just get married as young as possible and don't have sex before that. But what comes out of it, it's not really a culture in which people, especially young people, I think, are encouraged to think about like erotic relationships or romantic relationships in a way which is sort of grown up or in which you're actually reflecting on what are the possibilities, what are the costs and benefits of monogamy, you know, what are the costs and benefits of certain kinds of friendship. You know, what's normative is this idea of romantic attachment or erotic attachment as being always neurotic. It's basically a kind of 14-year-olds infatuated, experience of infatuation is presented as like the only sort of alternative a lot of the time. Alternative to what?

To just boring, you know, to a sort of sexless marriage. Right. I mean, I just, I would think that there's always been people everywhere around the world who have had like really strong. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily call it neurotic, but like attraction to other people that have driven. and not necessarily their choices, but it's driven their emotions, whether they thought it was the right thing to do or not in terms of actions. I don't know how that's related to late capitalism. Well, because historically, every culture has had a kind of set of script for how you deal with that. And I don't, and like, you know, there is very conservative scripts which

basically say spontaneous attachment is just nonsense. You should let your parents choose a partner for you and stay celibate till then. Yeah, but people still feel that. That's the argument that I'm making is that human beings have had and will have certain connections to each other. Okay, so the question is, to what extent do you think there is just an inherently kind of organic process of attraction that people have to each other? And organic, is the experience of kind of intense, erotic, romantic attachment, completely organic, or does it vary between cultures? Everybody experiences momentary infatuations with other people, but they can be really like socio-psychically disruptive

or you can just say well that's just an infatuation it's not really you know you don't have to let it take over your brain give us some room give me a reason to love you give me a reason to be a woman

I just absolutely love Glorybox by Porter's Head. And to me, nothing says desire as much as that mid-90s kind of trip-hop sound with the kind of bass and female vocals. So it's a classic. I think we've got to play Glory Box for that reason. Is that to do with the stage you were at there? Because to me, all that trip-hop is about that sort of, it brings to mind that sort of narcotized weird sensation of,

Narcetized desire, put it that way. Speak for yourselves, but you're probably right on the first one or not on the second one. So I'm not as, well, I choose music based on how it makes me feel, rather than the historical knowledge of it, because I have very little historical knowledge of music. But it's that sound to me. That sound says desire.

I can't quite explain it. It's probably got to do with the fact that I was in my, late teenage years when that song came out was big but that kind of sound with the bass and the trip hop and the female vocals and it's not just the Bristol sound it moves on to Morchiba which I think are from Kent as well which is much kind of lighter sound but it's that kind of sound it just says desire to me

I would put alongside that another track from the same moment and the same genre which is she makes me want to die by tricky. She makes me want to die. I mean, Tricky stuff from that moment is very much about exploring the sort of dangerous border between I I think attachment and, in fact, and obsession.

So if desire is, if a progressive view or if a socialist or communist view of desire is different to that of the conception of it being about need or hunger or trying to fill a whole, in a very literal sense, how does that map onto people's experience of the everyday? So are these conceptions of desire or imaginaries different if you, in a very literal sense, have your day-to-day needs met or not in a socioeconomic sense? So if you are literally hungry, how does that affect your desire in a political imaginary? when you guys are talking about a kind of a fascist desire, I'm trying to think about it in terms of like anyone.

Like how does anyone lock into one or the other? Well, one way to think about it if we start from like hunger is, you know, yeah, hunger is sort of like a need or a drive or something, but that's not desire, right? If I'm hungry, then I could just go and eat a carrot or something like that. Why do I desire, you know, sugar? Why do I want to eat? all of these things that I associate from my childhood and all these sorts of things, right?

You know, our tastes, etc., get developed in a sort of social, socially and politically. And so the desires, basically, desires get formed by social machines, by technical machines, etc. One of the things that came up in your discussion with Tabitha Fabast, actually, was when you were both discussing dating apps and the way that the introduction of dating apps seems to have had an effect on sexual desire or erotic desire. It's a really good example, I think, of, like, this is a sort of new technology. Of course, there were things, there were sort of dating agencies, et cetera, before that. But this is a new technology that comes along, which is absolutely linked to, you know,

the wider social structure and changes that have taken place in that. I, you know, it's totally linked to a sort of like neoliberal attitude in which you were trying to rate everything at all time, swipe left, et cetera, and on. these sorts of things. So I think it is a good example of things that we think of as as something that just emerged from within ourselves or perhaps even, you know, as sort of like rehearsals of like traumas we've suffered as a child or something like that. In fact, we can see that, you know, this is something that. It's socially constructed or mediated.

It's socially technically constructed. Yeah. Yeah. Which is sort of like goes, which goes to sort of Delors and Gautari's point, I think, that the unconscious, one of their famous lines is the unconscious is a factory, not a theater. It's not just the rehearsal of original sort of traumas or traumas from childhood. They may well take place, but the rest of society comes into play when we think about the production of desire and so forth. Whenever we're talking about things such as desire, which is quite slippery, we have to think about all of the, you know, we have to sort of escape the ways that we normally think about desire. And a lot of that is Freudian, for instance. And, you know, we fall in

to it quite a lot. I mean, this really follows on directly from the episode about crowds because the answers to the question, like how is revolutionary desire different from capitalist or conservative desire is that it's not, it's non-individualistic in some sense, or that it recognizes the extent to which it's always being produced in social situations and by-social situations. It doesn't suffer from a certain delusion that it can achieve, it can achieve resolution, either through, indeed, through the restoration of some lost order or through just the personal satisfaction of the successful consumer, that would be the difference. But then that touches on a question, which is another key political question for anybody

thinking about these issues around desire and ideology, which is, like, politically, if we accept all these arguments, then what do we do ourselves to prevent ourselves being, to prevent our desires from being determined for us by others. I think that is the big sort of political and ethical question for de Les Gritari in a way, actually. It's a question for a lot of us. How do we avoid having our desires manufactured by capitalism? Or by the Q&ON, conspiracy, conspiracy machine. The purpose of a lot of political activity, but also a lot of critical thought, is to enable us to not have our desires produced for us by our enemies. I think what What I'm taking from this is I'm basically trying to think about desire and time and I'm going to make the assumption that desire is always in some way forward looking.

So kind of in a, you know, in layman's terms, we're talking about like what do, in terms of what you guys were just saying about not wanting our desires to be defined by, you know, the structures of capital or capital's needs or like neoliberal culture or whatever. if we're thinking about what do I want my life to be like or what do I want from my life that's how I'm finding it helpful to think about okay well if I'm thinking that if I that I'm only going to be happy if I end up in this kind of relationship or I'm only going to be happy if I live in this kind of household or I'm only going to be happy if or it's only right

I mean maybe this isn't about happiness Maybe this is about what is morally correct for some people, right? But if we're thinking about, if I'm thinking about that as in the stuff that I desire is the stuff that I want to be good or better or happy or something. And I don't want, and what we're saying is, I think, is that how do we escape those things, whether it's material objects or relationships or how you want to live being defined by the,

dominant ideology, right? Perhaps it's like this, though, it's like the thing we have to escape is the idea that the sort of desires that we have now, which are socially constructed, you know, we have to, if we think of them as desires as producible, not in any simple way that we just,

you know, we can produce them in any simple way, but if they can be, if desire is not sort of based on lack or some sort of original sort of thing, it means that the desires we have now are not, that do not exhaust the possibility, of humankind, do you know what I mean? You know, we can have different desires.

So that's that sort of in terms of like the structure of society, etc. That means that the possible range of the structure of society can be much, much wider than if you don't see desire as produced. I also think it brings up this idea, this sort of, in fact, the acid communist idea, that, you know, you can have post-capitalist desire within capitalism, right? So that like, you know, capitalism cannot satisfy all of our desires. and in fact there are desires for like collectivity

desires produced in this in current society that can only be fulfilled in a completely different sort of set up, social and economic setup, etc. I mean it's, I think it's useful to think about what that means post-capitalist desires where do they come from?

What are they, etc.? I mean one of the ideas which these ideas from the late 60s onwards are drawing on are ideas like the sort of false production of needs. So Marcusa, I mean, Marcuse is a sort of in between, actually, he's a sort of in-between figure, isn't he? He's part of that Frank Fescal generation who were trying to understand fascism after the war, but his most famous work is more preoccupied with analyzing consumer society.

You know, I always tell students, if you want to understand what Marcus is getting exercised about, it's sort of, it's the world of madmen, that's what he's talking about. It's that kind of early 60s, high consumerism, but also very, very conformist, very heterosexual form of capitalism. And in one-dimensional man, for example, he's really, he argues that consumerism works through this production of false needs. It makes us need things or feel like we need things that we don't really need. And then if you take that analysis to stage further, you also can say that capitalism doesn't produce, it can't fulfill various needs or it can't fulfill various desires. although I guess those are two different concepts that are going to necessarily

sort of emerge from any sort of humans of social experience to some extent. I mean, obviously post-punk, I mean, one of the things it's most famous for is its sort of rejection of the eroticism and sensuality of most kinds of pop music. There's real sort of anti-sex, kind of anti-romance discourse

in strands of punk rock and post-punk. I guess ATVs, like my love lies limp. It's like the classic sort of anti-sex song. It's a punk song about impotence. Because my love lies limp. Keep away.

Don't touch me. Cause my love lies limp. Limp. Limp. Lips. Lips. Lips.

Lips. Cause my love lies lift. Because my love lies limp. We're starting to, I suppose, get towards thinking about how people have used these ideas to think about sort of intimacy and personal relationships. One way of illustrating some of these ideas, which I always find really useful, is just to say, well, actually, although it's really, really complicated stuff to try to read. So some of these ideas from Deliz and Guittari have been really important for me in just sort of managing personal relationships. It's a really, really useful way of thinking about, you know, how you organise, how you organise sort of emotional and physical needs and desires in a household.

It was a really, because I was doing a lot of work on Deleuze Guitari when we first, when Joe and I, my partner and I first became parents. And, you know, Joe and I had both, we'd both done therapy a bit in fairly sort of Freudian settings, and not loads. And I would say that one problem with it was that it does tend to inculcate a way of thinking about emotional life, which sees it in terms of the emotional life being very much individual and very sort of transactional. Ultimately, it's very hard not to slip into a way of thinking about your relationships with other people, which isn't thinking about them in terms of what you're getting from them and what you're giving to them. And it's very, very

difficult to organise relationships in a household where everybody is just struggling to cope with the fact that you've got one or two or more sort of little children that are very difficult to manage and you've got jobs and you've got things you need to do and things you want to do. It's very difficult to manage all that if you're thinking in those terms. And the sort of conceptual breakthrough, which I think, which we sort of got a bit from DeLis Gritari actually in terms of thinking about that was just to try to think about it in this completely non-individualistic sense. But without collapsing into some sort of conservative notion of divided gender roles or the traditional family, to say, well, actually, what the family is, it's a machine, it's an

assemblage, it's a little, it's a bundle of moving parts, which include our bodies and they include our brains, include our moods, they include the coffee in the pot, they include the beans cooking on the stove, they include the baby, they include the music on the sound system. And that really the way in which you manage how you feel and how you experience, and how you experience. experience that context, the way in which you have to manage it is by thinking about, what are the overall effects? What is it producing? Is it producing joy in an overall expansion of a sense of freedom? Or is it producing an overall reduction of joy, a reduction of a sense of freedom for everybody involved? And that is the criteria according to which you

make the judgments about how you're going to, who's going to take the rubbish out, who's going to look after the baby, like how many times, how much time you're each going to spend on whatever tasks that those are the criteria you use and that turned out to be really really effective like as a way of thinking about it and for me that's an interesting example of thinking about the way which desire is desire is kind of social and it's assembled and it's also manageable and it's producible and it's not something that can be thought that can be properly understood in terms of a sort of bourgeois model of individual transaction or a conservative model of norms which have to be ascribed and aspired to. How do you remove the barriers to people having what people

call empty marriages or whatever or like, you know, or doing terrible things to each other and domestic violence, you know, in the widest sense. And I think the answer to that is thinking like what in the widest sense, I don't necessarily mean romantic, but in the wider sense, what causes like really fraught problematic relationships? And one of them is like trust and the other one is fear. So, like, I would look at the conditions from, like, a progressive left-wing perspective. I'd be like, what are the conditions that make people, you know, live together when they don't want to live together? Like, get forced into, like, specific kinds of pairings or feel like they need to share, you know, a house or they need to lie about X, Y, and Z. Now,

there, there's a whole basket full of conditions where you'd be like, right, I want to create these environmental and structural freedoms so that people can live, you know, healthful, dignified lives, you know, with either enough wages or, you know, enough goods and services that they need, whether there are wages in this, this world or not. And then for me, that's where the experiment is, because I would feel like I have enough faith in human beings and how they will organize themselves that if you remove those barriers, then I actually don't mind how people have their relationships. That's probably what to think about it. If you think about the last sort of, well, the last 30 or 40 years. We do live through this sort of like temporary

moment of like Tinder, but like the family as the centre of society has come back in a huge way and like what's driving at is economics. I've just been reading the asset economy by Melinda Cooper and Lisa Adkins and Martin Coonings. Oh, I remember them. And they've got this central concept of the Minskian family, which is that basically we live in an asset dominated society. And so all of family life and our lives altogether are sort of subordinated under this idea that you have to, the family life is about managing your assets. The logic of assets go into the future. So it's all about, you know, inheritance, managing your assets. The family as the sort of core social unit and outside the family is just raw competition with very little

support. That sort of had this effect of solidifying the family and basically trapping us in this, you know, basically one model of life in lots of ways. So the way you get out of that is, you know, you have to undo that. You know, basically, you know, obviously housing is like the key asset we're talking about here. But like we have to get out of that somehow. And the only way you do that is basically removing all of those economic compulsions to form families, but dual incomes and to stay in families and the families to focus on intervening into their children's lives, life gifts or other forms of inheritance, etc.

When you take them away, then you open up the realm for experimentation, and people can actually find out how they want to live, which I think is the feminist project. It's not like, well, I think there was elements of the sort of 60s counterculture. It said, you know, basically, once you remove that, it would be free love and Bob's your uncle. It's like you remove economic compulsions, and then we'll have to find out the other compulsions, which keep us in these sort of normative frameworks. But that's the core way of expanding freedom. What's really interesting about what you've just said, Keir, is you've talked about compulsions, and I'd like to take this all the way back to desire. So maybe I have a bit more of a, you know, laissez-faire or libertarian.

I'm not sure which one, maybe a bit of both, like, view on the family or on any form of relationship. Like, I just think, in reality, bits of it are going to be down to, like, there's a spectrum in society of how people are going to want to live. And I think there's going to be people all along the spectrum, and society will allow you based on what you just said, you know, whether there are socioeconomic forces or whatever, the freedom or not to live within one or the other. But the question for me is, where are people's desires in terms of how they've arranged their life and their relationships? If all of their

desires and their fantasies of how they want to live or how they want to conduct themselves exist outside the form that they have found themselves in due to those social pressures, then we have a problem. So if you've got a group of people who are, they all want to live in communes or they'd rather not be in like these family units and you've got this situation en masse which arguably might be the case for a lot of people

or they can't imagine another possibility outside then there is an issue. But I think for a lot of people, frankly, the family does work. I mean, I just think that's the facts on the ground. I suppose one of the most interesting examples in a way. And I suppose it speaks to what I was saying, what we were saying earlier actually, about relationships is the opairs. And their most famous song is called It's Obvious.

It's this quite didactic lyric, it's sort of feminist lyric. I mean, it's sort of politically, it's completely complacent, actually. It's just saying it's just a song about how great it is to be in a kind of egalitarian heterosexual relationship and how that's basically quite easy. I've always kind of taking the piss out of it when playing it to students, saying, like, it's, you know, it's easy for some people. It's not easy for most of us. I suppose I hadn't ever thought about this before,

but what I was saying before about the kind of the permanent celebration of neurosis, and kind of romantic failure. Maybe it's an interesting counterpoint to that. Just a quick defense for that song, though. I think it's... The chorus is like, it's just a repeating equal but different, equal but different over and over again. Surely equal but different is

Hart and Negri's concept of the multitude, isn't it? It is the early differentiation of the multitude. I think they're talking about specifically sexual difference. Well, I'm sure they are. One concept, I think, is sort of, useful is this concept of negative solidarity, which I think actually Alex Williams came up with on his blog, Splintering Bone Ashes. And it's basically this idea that rather than pursuing your own

fulfillment of your own interests or desires, your desire is structured around owning the libs or basically about trying to gain joy from preventing other people fulfilling their desires, right? You know, in some ways, it's this sort of celebration of your own hardship in your own life and nobody should have it better, basically, it's like the basic idea. The example Alex used, which is sort of useful in its mundaneity, is people not, people thinking public sector workers should have working conditions that are as bad as theirs are. I mean, at this very moment, we're trying to finish the chapter of our book about the concept of interests. We probably would use this idea of negative solidarity. It would say that

It's what's occurring at a moment when there's no conception whatsoever that present conditions could really be improved for everybody. And so the people experiencing or expressing negative solidarity, they have no desire, actually, in the Delersian sense. There's no desire because there's no notion of anything that could go beyond where they are now. All they have is a will to defend stuff they've already got. It's despair, isn't it? It's a hopelessness.

This is term from Nietzsche. I'm sure we've referred to before on the show. It's always used, it's always given in English translations with the French term, Rizontimo, which in French just means resentment. For Nietzsche, it's the affect of those who are weak and experience weakness, but they don't want to make themselves strong, they just want to make, they just resent the strong, or they ideally want to knock them down or drag them down to their level. And one reason actually Nietzsche, even though he was kind of taken up by fascist in the first half

of the 20th century, one reason Nietzsche, in the 60s onwards, in France in particular, it gets taken up by people on the radical, the libertarian left, is precisely because of that concept, because it seems to have this, seems to get at something which is important in the way the right operates in a kind of advanced capitalist society. The right, indeed, it operates by encouraging people not to realize how strong they are or potentially strong they are collectively, and instead to just fear, fear the collective, to fear the other, to fear people who are different from them, but even to fear their own kind of collective potential. and see it as something that might disrupt the kind of the little bit of comfort and stability

they've been given by sort of post-war consumer capitalism. I mean, the growth of negative solidarity as a form of Rizontim, as a way of only conceptualising interests in defensive terms, rather than imagining a better will, they obviously ties in really closely with your kind of analysis of generational politics gear, because I think it's really, I mean, the ultimate in negative solidarity is the fucking, is the retired Tory voting homeowner, saying, oh, well, because, you know, I didn't get to go to university. I experienced a relatively, or see a relatively kind of limited kind of consumer culture when I was growing up. Therefore, basically everyone else should. I mean, young people should experience the same or worse.

You can definitely do a generational sort of analysis of it. Even more straightforward definition of like conservatism, which is like it's Cory Robbins definition where he says, conservatism is, you know, the experience of having some sort of power, we can define that in a sort of way, and the fear that is, that that power is going to be taken away from your diminished. And so you can sort of think about it as a sort of, as a messed up version of almost class power, right? It's that, you know, this is a generation that grew up at the end and had the benefits of that, of the end of the sort of post-war settlement, the sort of end of social democracy, and then they were bought out of it via asset ownership, etc.

In some ways, it's the defence of the only bit that remains of that expansion of freedom that was then in the post-war period, the only remnant of that is the mechanism by which that was taken away, which is asset ownership. And so if you own an asset, you are suspended from some of the worst effects of the harsh, harsh, harsh neoliberal world that we live in. The image that's coming to mind here is a bunch of Tory voting boomers who are on each one on their own arc, but they think they're on an inflatable lifeboat, and they're basically saying, don't rock the boat, because your desire is disruptive, the fear that these desires, and I think you're going to talk about Corbyn in a minute, but that any kind of change is going to rock something.

and if your own self-image of your own life and assets is that it's that small and I don't want anyone to have anything more than what I have and if they do, then I'm going to capsize effectively. It feels like that's the emotional picture that I'm getting. It's like, no, mate, you own your own house, you're on a fucking arc, like, chill. Yeah, yeah. You can explain lots of what happens with generations without any recourse to desire. What is hard to explain about this thing, rather than just protecting your interests

through alignment with sort of the financial real estate sector, which I think is what the thing is driving sort of property pensioners being the core constituency of conservatism. The thing you can't explain is the sheer bitterness and miserableness of it all, the sheer bitterness and nihilism that goes along with it. Just to come back really, really briefly on the whole Q&ON thing, all of that stuff, all of that sort of conspiracy stuff about child eating... pedophiles like that is in some way it's it's like a sublimated it is an awareness that like we do face incredible really really hard problems the world is you know could could could be sort of coming to

an end but rather than face up to that you sort of invent something an imaginary world in which you are the protagonist but like you can have the sense of like a crisis without addressing the actual crisis because the actual crisis would mean addressing your own position and sort of perhaps undermining your own interests or your own interests as they've been constructed over the last 30 years, i.e. as a homeowner, an asset owner, et cetera. There's bits of the right, which I think it leads you to thinking about desire as something which is politically analytic, I think. But yeah, you're right, Nadia. I think we can't exclude the left from that. The left, desire also operates in the left, and desire can also get trapped. It can be a really powerful, productive force,

but it can get trapped in places which block us off from wider and joy, cruel optimism, as Lauren Berlant calls it. On both, on all, you know, structures are difficult for people to understand, stories, you know, and religion, cults, we talked about this in the episode where we talked about the cosmic right. Like, there is just another angle to looking at this, which is how people understand, how people digest information. and narrative and stories is always a big part of it. And that links into what you're saying about like the fascist desires, about having specific figureheads is much easier to understand. Like even the kind of what we would think of as a crazy pedophile ring story. It's like there are people with names and addresses and they are responsible.

It's much easier than saying, you know, 150 years of capitalism and like late neoliberalism. It's very difficult to conception. who do you fight, right? Who are the baddies? And it's also just people wanting things to be resolved quickly. I mean, we've talked about this before. We could probably do a whole episode about millinarianism sometime. I mean, it's a term that people's first started to be used like a thousand years ago when people thought that the year 1000 would be the end of the world, as promised in the Bible, you know, when Jesus comes back. And QAnon, I mean, I'm always saying this when we're talking about QAnon. You can really overstate how novel QAnon is, in my view.

insofar as there are millinarian cults all the time. There are always millinarian cults for people to join. So millinarianism is the belief that somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, your side is about to win, is about to be delivered. And all of the contradictions which define your social world and make your life difficult and your emotional life difficult are about to be resolved. I mean, one of the critics of certain strands of Marxism is that Marxism, historic, has a millinarian version of itself, which thinks that

what's going to happen is eventually history is going to end because all of the contradictions in society of capitalism are going to be completely resolved by the arrival of full communism like after the constructive stage of socialism and there was definitely a millinerian strand of Corbinism which thought that we were about to get a socialist government which would at least end neoliberalism decisively and basically restore social democracy despite all objective evidence that there was no physical way that could happen at this particular historical juncture. There's still a completely millionaire in structure to the way in which so many people on the Corbynite or base Corbynite left want to blame like some faction of the left or even blame

someone for the fact that that didn't happen as if that is what should have happened and was ordained and it must have been the case that some evil force, some external force interrupted it from happening because it was what was supposed to happen. When any objective, the Marxist would say that the class relations were just not, the balance of class forces in British society in 2018 was such that there was just no way that was going to happen. And even if Corbyn had managed to win an election, he would have been completely undermined by all of the oppositional forces, and we were just nowhere close to actually being able to

achieve that. Yeah, but saying all of that, we all piled in to various degrees. But that brings up, I think that brings up the thing of desire, though, right? right, is that like now I think all three of us are probably like, okay, yeah, now we need to have a sort of objective view of this. Where did, where did it get us? How did it change the balance of forces and what should we do now? And so basically what we'd like people to have is some sort of instrumental or strategic relationship to both Corbyn as a figure, the Corbyn Labor Party and the Labour Party now and et cetera, et cetera. And instead on the left, it seems it is

incredibly hard to move on from that, partly because, you know, the Labour right has, is having to go at Corbyn all the time. They can't move on from Corbyn either. But I think there is something to this idea that, like, you know, people do invest their desires in leaders, basically. And Corbyn was one of those. And now it's very hard to shift from that, to sort of put Corbyn, to see Corbyn as a person in history and see how, you know,

well, in that case, we need to sort of, you know, understand where we are now. We need to not fight the battles of 2019. over and over again for the next 10 years. It may be that this thing has to happen, but, you know, I think that's, I mean, that's the populist sort of argument. The political sort of strategy, perhaps,

which has done most to sort of try to take into account sort of ideas of desire, or at least one of them, is sort of populism and this idea that, you know, you can figure a one side, you know, basically divide the country between a sort of people and an elite and then one figure can come to represent, you know, the people. or something like that, there was definitely a element of that around Corbinism

and around left populism more generally. And I think it's when you get into a moment like now, you see there are limits of that, there are drawbacks of that because it's very hard to get people to de-invest in figures, you know, once that moment has gone. I keep thinking about this. Well, where do I invest my sort of desires? Is it in sort of like a more universal idea of,

or a sort of like longer-term project? Is that the thing that structures my desires, is that possible? There is an answer to that, and this would be the defense of psychoanalysis, even in the Freudian tradition, which would be to say, well, look, the point actually of studying things like that is to enable you to achieve a degree of reflexivity about it. Like, it's not to give up your desire. I mean, the psychoanalysis will definitely say,

we're not telling people to give up their desire. We're telling people to recognize it for what it is in a certain sense. And I sort of feel like, I don't know how else to put it really, but the sort of the correct attitude to have to Corbyn was always to recognise that on a certain level, we couldn't help but invest in him psychically and identify and love him for his saintly qualities, etc. At the same time as on another level, rationally recognising his limitations and the limitations of the movement, just in the same way, ultimately you can't get beyond negative solidarity and defensiveness, and you can't get beyond the fact that indeed, if you're a property pensioner,

It is economically and politically quite rational right now to just want to defend the value of your property and not gamble any of it, your accumulated privilege on the possibility of a social democratic revival. You can't get beyond that without a certain will to power, a certain, you know, a certain expression of desire. I mean, the way Alex and I are trying to conceptualize this is that it isn't, as to those and Qatari themselves put it actually in it isn't about the expression of desire versus the expression of interest. It's actually about the expression of a possible set of interests which could only be realized on some longer temporal scale within a communist horizon or a socialist horizon. But nonetheless, there is a certain

effort of will and a certain suspension of disbelief and a certain lifting of yourself from the immediate logic of defensive calculation, which you have to make in order for that to be possible. And that's always been the case and there would never have been a welfare state or a national health service or a Russian Revolution or a Spanish Civil War if people hadn't been able to do that. So ultimately you need to be effective as a radical. You have to be able to try to hold all of these thoughts at the same time. But yeah, there's a degree of a rationality to it. Yes, there's a degree of, well, that's it really, is to recognize that there is, there are different logics of rationality operating and motivating all of us at the same time always. So there were, to some

extent, we have to be able to move between them. I mean, I would say, you know, with respect to colonialism, that, yeah, we all recognize that. And also, it was both rational and necessary in a way which exceeds rationality to have a go when the opportunity presented itself, you know, to throw the dice, to see what we could achieve and how far we could get. On the other hand, it's also necessary to be detached and rational and recognize that the chances of success were very low and that if you invested so much in it, that you now hate almost everyone else involved, because you blame them for not having delivered what you thought you were going to get, then you know, you made some sort of an emotional error really. And there definitely are loads

of people around, frankly, at least on Twitter. They invested so much in it and had such an unreflective sense of certainty about the validity and moral worth of their investment in Corbyn, that they're now just angry at almost everyone else. But I don't think that's necessarily why I think everyone's angry. I think angry because loss is a very difficult thing for a lot of people to deal with. That's true, yeah. Like, that's the symptom to grieving. Like, that's what happens when you grieve.

There's people who are grieving and they're unable to cope with that. And people reacted differently. People who were at the time of the election who, like you said, they said, with a very rational mind, let's give it our best shot, it still hurts that we're in this situation and seeing the world around us. some people reacted in certain ways and not everyone is able to have a, you know, totally cool head on because the stakes are so high, I think. No one is.

No one is. I agree. No one is capable of that of being that all the time. But that's also, it's something to aspire to do. It's shit. It's shit that we lost. Like, it is shit, like objectively. No, well, that's true.

Yeah, that is also a completely good point. Just thinking about Jeremy Corbyn as, as the leader, which people invested their desires and how that's sort of a problem to move on. So one of the things that we might be able to do about that is to think differently about leaders, basically, about leadership, I have like different metaphors. And so I'm thinking of the distinction between a star and a comet, right? So we think about, we used to thinking about leaders,

or perhaps even celebrities more as stars, as though they generate their own heat and light in some way, whereas like a comet might be a better way to think about leaders in relationship to desire because like comets I don't generate their own heat and light you know when they're out in the sort of outer solar system they you're you can't see them basically they're invisible so they only become visible when they come into the inner solar system and they interact with these active forces basically which would be like heat and heat from the sun and like solar wind which gives a direction to the to the tail etc right so that gives you a sort of metaphor of

of these bodies which are just anonymous until they come in contact with the right active forces and then they become luminous and in fact like the active forces are only visible through their effect on these bodies do you know what I mean? Desire, the desires that we invest in people those are the active forces

and so like if we can recognise that like it's the forces that are important and not the body that is illuminated by those forces or that illuminates those forces that might help us not get fixated on these figures and be able to move on from them. Yeah, that's a nice metaphor. That's some nice metaphor.

I think that's some serious lockdown metaphoring. You've got there, Keir. I want whatever drug you've taken. Seriously. The only drug is rhetoric.