Volume 066 min read
Lyotard
Module I · The Foundation
Objective
By the end of this volume you understand the most disturbing contribution to the French foundation, Jean-François Lyotard's libidinal economy. You know why he short-circuited desire with economic intensity and what unsettling question he posed: whether the subject secretly enjoys its own dissolution by capital. With that you close the philosophical foundation and hold all three French sources from which the CCRU drew its language and its stance.
Exposition
Jean-François Lyotard is known to most as a theorist of the postmodern, the thinker of the end of grand narratives. But the work that counts for the CCRU comes from an earlier, wilder phase. In 1974 he published Économie libidinale, the libidinal economy. The book is considered his most extreme and he later regarded it with unease himself. He called it, at one point, his evil book. Precisely that shamelessness made it valuable to the group. Where other texts weigh things carefully, this one drives a single thought to its most uncomfortable limit.
The title itself entangles two words that ordinary thinking works to keep apart. Libidinal means desire, the driving force, pleasure. Economy means the household of forces, the system of production, circulation, and exchange. Lyotard claims it is a single economy. The flows of desire and the flows of capital are not two realms one might compare but the same event seen from two sides. What appears in the economy as a flow of money and goods is at once a flow of intensities, of pleasure and drive. That fusion continues what you met in Deleuze and Guattari as the adjacency of desire and production, but Lyotard drives it further and strips it of all comfort.
The comfort he strips away is critique itself. The Marxist tradition regards capitalism as a system of alienation. The worker is separated from their labour, from its product, from themselves. They suffer that separation, and the task of critique consists in naming that suffering and liberating the alienated subject. The whole edifice rests on one presupposition, that the human at bottom does not want what is happening to them, that they are a victim who can be redeemed. Lyotard attacks precisely that presupposition. He poses a question that pulls the ground out from under critique.
The question is whether the subject doesn't enjoy its own decomposition. Whether in the suffering of alienation, in the dissolution of fixed identity, in exhaustion through labour, there isn't also a dark pleasure that critique refuses to see. Lyotard brings a notorious example that carries the full harshness of his thesis. He speaks of the workers of early industrialisation who streamed from the land into the factories and slums, whose bodies were worn out in the manufactories. Humanist critique sees in this only victims of a cruel system, and in an obvious sense that's true. But Lyotard refuses to stop there. He claims that in that destruction there was also enjoyment, a pleasure in the dissolution of the old village order, in one's own transformation, in the plunge into the new and the nameless. The subject, he says, doesn't only cling to its identity, it also enjoys its destruction.
Pause here, because this thought is dangerous and Lyotard knows it. It can be misread as a mockery of real suffering, as a cynicism that talks exploitation up. Lyotard doesn't want to claim that. His aim is not to deny the suffering but to shake the self-assurance of a critique that always already knows what the victim wants. He exposes an ambivalence that humanist thinking represses, that desire cannot be enlisted on the side of the good and of self-preservation, that it can also desire its own passing. This is the same refusal to resolve the ambivalence you already met in Volume 3 with positive feedback. Lyotard holds fascination and horror together instead of choosing a side.
For the CCRU, and for Nick Land in particular, this thought was incendiary. It permitted a break with the left tradition of capitalism critique without trivialising capitalism. The group could acknowledge capital as a destructive force and at the same time let itself be seized by the fascination of that destruction. Lyotard supplied the permission to not merely analyse the unbinding but to desire it, to affirm the plunge into the nameless as intensity rather than mourn it. Out of that permission grows Land's later stance, which wants not to brake the runaway of capital but to go along with it.
Now order the three French sources in relation to each other, because with this volume the foundation is complete and you should be able to survey the design. Deleuze and Guattari supplied the productive machine of desire and the deterritorialising movement of capital, which is to say the what and the how of the process. Lyotard added the affective disposition, the pleasure in that process, the yes to one's own dissolution, which is to say the why of the fascination. Together they yield a stance that neither defends capitalism nor condemns it from outside, but enters into its movement and asks where it leads. That stance, joined with the cybernetic model of escalation from Volumes 2 and 3, forms the complete ground on which the CCRU stands.
Core Claim
In the libidinal economy Lyotard fuses desire with economic flow and poses the unsettling question of whether the subject enjoys its own dissolution by capital. This gave the CCRU permission to affirm the unbinding of capital as intensity rather than brake it, and completed the group's affective foundation.
The Critic
Lyotard later disowned this book, and that is more than coquetry. He turned away from his entire direction of thought and took a path leading him to questions of law, of the differend, of justice, which is to say to precisely what the libidinal economy had pushed aside. Use the book as a foundation and you use a work its author considered a wrong turn. That doesn't refute it, but it forbids appeal to its authority.
The central claim is moreover untestable. Whether workers in the factories of the nineteenth century enjoyed their own destruction cannot be established. The people are dead, they wrote almost nothing, and what they felt is inaccessible. Lyotard attributes to them an affect he cannot evidence, and he hedges twice over, because a denial from those concerned could be read as repression. A thesis confirmed by its own denial is no longer a thesis.
What remains is the doubt about a critique that always already knows what the victim wants, and that doubt lands. It lands in both directions, however. Whoever charges humanist critique with speaking for others is, in this example, speaking for others themselves, only with the sign reversed. The charge of presumption falls back on whoever levels it.
Bridge to the Next Volume
The philosophical foundation is in place. But the CCRU fed on more than theory. Its material came equally from science fiction, from cyberpunk, and from the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft. Volume 7 shows why the group took these popular and fantastic sources more seriously than some philosophical writings and how fiction became for them a means of knowledge. With that the foundation module closes, and the path leads back to the group itself.