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Conclusion: From Immanence to Micropolitics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2017
Summary
I stated in the introduction that my primary aim was to offer the conceptual answer to the question of capitalism's survival. As is evident, I took subjectivity as my starting premise, in the vein of Marx. Moving beyond the pre-conscious interests of ideology, however, I have sought to provide the conceptual basis for micropolitical unconscious investments of desire. That is, the way in which desire is, though productive, socially produced and managed such that it comes to desire its own repression (capitalism) and/or comes to be shaped in a manner conducive to the continual functioning of capitalism. Conceptually speaking, this notion of desire is a ‘pure’ immanent one, defined primarily in terms of a seemingly simple idea: the fold. A ‘pure’ immanence is a folded immanence. Indeed, the fold also allows us to conceptualise and ultimately articulate immanent resistance to the social contortion and productive repression of desire.
How are we to understand the fold? In tracing the thought of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze, I have conceptualised the fold in terms that pit it against Hegel's idea of ‘holes’ or negativity as the constituting factor of being. The Outside extensive multiplicity is folded into the Inside intensive multiplicity, and an Inside is folded back out or into the Outside, in what is a seemingly circular process of folding. Metaphysically, this equates to saying that the seemingly purely philosophical (the plane of the virtual multiplicity) is deeply related to the seemingly purely socio-political (plane of the actual multiplicity), forming a continuum. One cannot be separated from the other, if we are to reach the Absolute. Any philosophical account of the subject and subjectivity must, by necessity, deal with the concrete socio-political Outside and vice versa; any theoretical account of the concrete must, by necessity, deal with the philosophical. There is no truly public-private distinction to be had, no matter or action that is truly beyond the marriage of the philosophical and socio-political, no ultimate stable point of departure, no transcendent outside, nothing truly beyond that which we live in ultimate flux that can be relied on as a pre-socio-political or extra-socio-political ground, and certainly no subject – be that as a positive Body or a negative Being – as an external precondition of thought, meaning and action.
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- Immanence and MicropoliticsSartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze, pp. 169 - 187Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017