The Infernal Desiring Machines

What I would like to explore is the connection between our psyche and the political. Particularly in times such as these, when the outside world so easily fills us with discomfort and existential anxiety, one looming question casts its spooky shadow over me: “How??”. How is it possible that a group of supposedly rational men, in charge of leading nations, could bring about this state of affairs? More than that, how is it possible that democracy could create such monsters? These two questions have already been largely elaborated upon, but they prompt a third one, which will be our topic of discussion today: is this what people desire? Looking into the concept of desire through a philosophical and psychoanalytic lens will bring us to a nuanced understanding of the political, and more importantly to a deeper understanding of the relationship between anarchist theory and practice. Instead of the psychoanalytic conception of desire as lack, or the Hegelian conception of desire as the cause of struggle, I would like us to adopt a positive, non-oppositional view on desire, a horizontal understanding of its objects, and the ways in which it creates the world we inhabit, alongside Gilles Deleuze.
At the same time, however, one needs to be acutely aware of the relationship that Marx identified between infrastructure and superstructure. In short, the material conditions of a society (here, more broadly, its power relations) are what the passive constitution of the individual’s psyche proceeds from, giving rise to ghastly ideologies. Individual psyche, in turn, also operates active connections through desire, organising a social field with its own psychic mechanisms of desire, which form an inhomogeneous machinery together with the machinery of production. The human psyche and the material world are continually, mutually self-shaping, and triangulate, together with techné (broadly speaking the tools we use to access and engage with the world) the continuous process of becoming humanity is subject to.
Finally, I would like to once again touch some grass. What is our place in this machinery? What constitutes a “good”, meaningful interaction with the world? What constitutes an act of resistance to the Infernal Desiring Machines? Here, I suggest that we look to the aesthetic order, and to the potential for creation that accumulates throughout the machinations of desire. A political revolution is necessarily also a revolution of desire, a paradigmatic shift in the way we engage with the world. I want to look to this creative principle as a guiding principle for our praxis as anarchists.
The discussion will be punctuated by fragments from an incredible novel by Angela Carter, titled The Infernal Desiring Machines of Dr. Hoffman, offering us incredible starting points for reflection on human desire, the metaphysics of technology and technological power, and the collapse of the social machine.