“Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. It is easier to show their common opposition to a phenomenology of the sacred, understood as a propaedeutic to the ‘revelation’ of meaning, than their interrelationship within a single method of demystification.”
Ricoeur, 1970: 32)
By way of general introduction to the idea of a history of the techniques of interpretation from the Greek grammarians to our own day, Foucault proposes that it would be possible to say that language, in the Indo-European cultures at least, has always given birth to two kinds of suspicions: that language does not mean exactly what it says; and that language exceeds its verbal form in some way, so that there are other things in the world which speak and which are not language.
“Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodical procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail; its writing is not only performative, it produces rules — other conventions — for new performativities and never installs itself in the theoretical assurance of a simple opposition between performative and constative.” (Derrida, 2007: 23)
1 Destruktion, Deconstruction, (De)Construction and Deconstructionism
It is not possible to use the word ‘deconstruction’, which itself is a value or stands for a certain set of values in terms of academic inquiry, without evoking a chain of associations, for example, to German philosophy of the early 20th century, French philosophy of the mid-20th century, the American re-articulation of these philosophical traditions in the latter part of the 20th century and the controversies surrounding the term that subsequently arose through “the American invention of French theory” (Cusset, 2008: xiv).
Since the beginning of the 21st century, Elizabeth Povinelli argues, critical theoretical discourses have been marked by a particular style and approach. They have shifted, she suggests, from hermeneutic and deconstructive methods of reading towards a set of methods of knowledge production informed by mathematically-inspired philosophy and the natural sciences. A number of names have been given to this emergent field: the ontological turn; new materialism; and posthumanism.
Despite the variety of names given, Povinelli ascribes a common thread to these scholarly efforts. She contends that these scholars are seeking to imagine a form of political solidarity that is grounded in the entanglement of human, other-than-human and more-than-human existents [or inter-actants]. Thus, Povinelli suggests that, despite the variety of discourses under these headings, they can all be taken to be making the ontological claim, in different ways, that ‘existence is entangled’. Two of the major theorists that Povinelli cites in this context are Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. Haraway, with her emphasis on species entanglement and symbiogenetic kinship, aims to establish the basis of an anticapitalist, antiracist, posthuman feminist perspective (Povinelli, 2021: 17).
References
Povinelli, E. A. (2021) Between Gaia and ground. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
RELATED TERMS: Narratology; Reception theory and reader response criticism; Interaction Design
Literary theory is the study and analysis of literature in general. Narratology can be considered a branch of literary theory.
More recent literary theory tends to move away from earlier critical approaches, for example, Russian Formalism, New Criticism and French structuralist narratology of the 1960s, by shifting emphasis towards the reader. In both reception theory, Rezeptionsästhetik, which has had its greatest impact in Germany, and reader-response criticism, associated mainly with American criticism, the role of the reader is seen as crucial. Continuity between these two strands of literary theory can be found through the work of Wolfgang Iser, who is commonly cited in both.
Insights from reception theory and reader-response criticism may prove useful in shaping interactions in interaction design, while taking interaction in the direction of narrative.
References
Iser, W. (1972) The reading process: A phenomenological approach, New Literary History, 3(2), pp. 279–299. doi: 10.2307/468316.
Iser, W. (1990) The Aesthetic and the imaginary, in The States of ‘Theory’: history, art, and critical discourse. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 201–220.
Newton, K. M. (ed.) (1997) Twentieth-century literary theory: a reader. 2nd edn. New York, NY: Macmillan Education.
The term ‘ergodic’ might be said to occupy a similar territory to that of aleatory.
Bringing together two Greek roots, ergon meaning work and hodos meaning path, ergodic is a term borrowed from physics by Espen Aarseth (1997: 2) who uses it to suggest that a, “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” in the context of cybertextuality.
References
Aarseth, E.J. (1997). Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Critical race theory, as a movement, is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism and power. While traditional civil rights discourse stresses incrementalism and gradual progress, by contrast critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017: 3).
Critical race theory had its first stirrings in the 1970s when a number of lawyers, activists and legal scholars across the USA realised, at roughly the same time, that the advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled. Worse, these advances were, in many respects, being rolled back. Early proponents, such as Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman and Richard Delgado, put their minds to the task of creating new theories and strategies, necessary to combat the subtler forms of racism that were gaining ground (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017: 4).
Derrick Bell, for example, spent the latter part of his career as an academic, during which time, he came to realise that the decisions in landmark civil-rights cases in the USA had had limited long-term practical effect. From this insight, he drew an unsettling conclusion: racism is so deeply ingrained in American society that it reasserts itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it. He began to argue that racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of US society. These ideas were a major source of influence for the body of thought that came to be known in the 1980s as critical race theory (Cobb, 2021).
Critical race theory builds on the insights of two previous movements: critical legal studies and radical feminism (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017: 5). It also draws from certain European philosophers and theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In addition, it takes insights from the American radical tradition, for example, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the Black Power and Chicano movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Among the basic tenets of critical race theory, not all of which are held by all practitioners, are the following:
racism is ordinary; it is the normal way US society does business; and is the common, everyday experience of most people of colour in the USA;
the US system of white-over-colour ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group (sometimes called ‘interest convergence’ or material determinism);
race and races are products of social thought and relations – not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality, they are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient;
the dominant society racialises different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs, such as the labor market;
the notions of intersectionality and anti-essentialism, which holds that no person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity;
the voice-of-colour thesis holds that minority status brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism, a thesis that co-exists in an uneasy tension with anti-essentialism.
This last point, about the competence to speak, in other words, to be a reliable narrator of one’s own experience, raises the issue of power in relation to narrative. Thus, Delgado and Stefancic (2017: 11) note that, “The ‘legal storytelling’ movement urges black and brown writers to recount their experiences with racism and the legal system and to apply their own unique perspectives to assess law’s master narratives.” To this, the design of narrative environments would add that attention also needs to be paid to the ways in which people are ‘told’, both in the sense of being guided or instructed and in the sense of being narrated, by the ways in which their spatio-temporal environments are structured, that is, by the ways in which ‘master narratives’ are articulated environmentally.
References
Bell, D. (1992) Faces at the bottom of the well: the permanence of racism. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Childers, S. M. (2014) Promiscuous analysis in qualitative research, Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), pp. 819–826. doi: 10.1177/1077800414530266.
Cole, M. (2009) Critical race theory and education: a Marxist response. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Crenshaw, K. et al. (eds) (1995) Critical race theory: the key writings that formed the movement. New York, NY: New Press.
Delgado, R. and Stefancic, J. (eds) (2017) Critical race theory: an introduction. 3rd edn. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Forlano, L. (2017) Posthumanism and design, She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. Elsevier, 3(1), pp. 16–29. doi: 10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001.
Henry, K. L. and Powell, S. N. (2021) Kissing cousins: critical race theory’s racial realism and Afropessimism’s social death, in Grant, C. A., Woodson, A. N., and Dumas, M. J. (eds) The Future is black: Afro-pessimism, fugitivity and radical hope in education. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 79–85.
Ladson-Billings, G. and Tate, W. F. (1995) ‘Toward a critical race theory of education’, Teachers College Record, 97(1), pp. 47–68.
Tuhkanen, M. (2009) The American optic: psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and Richard Wright. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
“Ordinary life, [Barry Cryer] used to say, is badly written, so he infused it with jokes.”
(Andrew Martin, 2023)
“Design and the everyday are inextricably intertwined. Because it plays such a constitutive role in everyday life, it is hard to say that there is design work that truly engages, or does not engage, the everyday. … This is, I believe, Lefebvre’s point. The ordinary is ungraspable, slippery, and constantly confounding. Nothing is easier to point to and yet nothing eludes analysis more immediately.”
(Hunt, 2003: 70)
“A paradoxical presence in our lives, design is both invisible and conspicuous, familiar and strange. It surrounds us while fading from view, becoming second nature and yet seemingly unknowable.”
(Blauvelt, 2003: 14)
“The world is a metaphysics, that is: the way it presents itself first of all, its supposed objective neutrality, its simple material structure, are already part of a certain metaphysical interpretation that constitutes it.”
(Tiqqun, 2011: 10)
In some respects, design practices could be considered to be a critical, creative and reflexive practice within and about everyday life, interested not just in the ordinary but also the extraordinary. However, the everyday may not seem fertile ground for design practices, particularly, for example, if one takes one’s orientation from the proposition articulated by Maurice Blanchot (1987: 17) that,
“The everyday, where one lives as though outside the true and the false, is … without responsibility and without authority, without direction and without decision, a storehouse of anarchy, since casting aside all beginning and dismissing all end. This is the everyday.”
(Blanchot, 1987: 17)
Yet if one is attentive to Blanchot’s qualification, that it is “as though” this is the case, then it can be seen that the issues with which design practices are concerned are indeed present in the everyday: truth and falsehood or authenticity and inauthenticity; responsibility and authority; directionality and decisiveness; order and disorder; beginning and ending.
The everyday, everyday life or daily life, is the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the habitual (Perec, 2008), that which is taken for granted, that which is given and which is all too familiar and therefore goes unnoticed and is overlooked. The everyday is that which slips into the background; or, as Maurice Blanchot (1987: 12) puts it in an essay section heading, “The Everyday: What is Most Difficult to Discover”.
Agnes Heller (1985), from a different perspective, suggests that the everyday might be understood as the most fundamental ontological category of society, albeit one that is not an unchanging essence but has to be continually re-constructed. For Heller, the everyday constitutes the shared life experience through which the world is intersubjectively constituted.
In terms of an actantial approach to the agency of design in the shared world, everyday entities, from clothes to furnishings to architectures to institutional and infrastructural systems, actively environ. To environ is one of design’s primary modes of actantiality. It becomes an unrecognised and unrecognisable part of the atmosphere, unless attention is disrupted and the familiar made strange (again).
For this reason, the everyday may be of great significance in thinking about design practices because, similarly to the interventions of neo-avant-garde artists, a designed entity or environment can provide a way of, “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed”, as George Brecht, conceptual artist and member of Fluxus, once described his art. Appropriating Zen and other forms of Mahayana Buddhism for their own ends, the work of neo-avant-garde artists and composers, such as the ‘anti-art’ of George Maciunas, a central figure in Fluxus, and the ‘situation art’ of Tom Marioni, rejected orthodox modernism in favour of the sheer immediacy and authenticity of everyday life.
Everyday life is a central, highly diverse and problematic theme for modern philosophy and social theory and, since the mid-1990s, has become persistent topic within art practice. The analysis of the everyday has been undertaken by such thinkers as Dilthey, Wittgenstein, Simmel, Husserl, Schutz, Heidegger, Dewey, Lefebvre, Kosik, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas, Garfinkel, Debord and de Certeau.
As Lefebvre (2014: 679) points out, this represents a radical change of focus for philosophy, because,
“In the past, philosophers excluded daily life from knowledge and wisdom. Essential and mundane, it was deemed unworthy of thought. Thought first of all established a distance (an epoche) vis-a-vis daily life, the domain and abode of non-philosophers.”
Lefebvre, 2014: 679)
By changing its focus thus, Lefebvre suggests, philosophy is seeking to renew itself by overcoming speculative abstraction, an endeavour which has been ongoing since Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Lukacs and others.
As Gardiner (2006: 207) highlights, the theorists mentioned above set out to problematise everyday life, to expose its manifold contradictions, effects and determinations, as well as its hidden potentialities. This problematisation is accomplished through various techniques such as the alienation effect, estrangement or defamiliarisation, whose aim is to unsettle the state of habitual, perpetual distraction that, it is argued, constitutes the everyday life of modernity, thereby jolting it into a condition of active awareness or mindfulness.
Such approaches clearly differ from mainstream sociological studies, in which the everyday is the realm of the ordinary. In the alternative sketched out by Lefebvre and others, the everyday is treated as incipiently extraordinary.
Thus, Lefebvre (1987: 9) argues that,
“The concept of everydayness does not therefore designate a system, but rather a denominator common to existing systems including judicial, contractual, pedagogical, fiscal, and police systems. Banality? Why should the study of the banal itself be banal? Are not the surreal, the extraordinary, the surprising, even the magical, also part of the real? Why wouldn’t the concept of everydayness reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary?”
As Gardiner (2006: 207) explains,
“The ordinary can become extraordinary not by eclipsing the everyday, or imagining we can arbitrarily leap beyond it to some ‘higher’ level of cognition, knowledge or action, but by fully appropriating and activating the possibilities that lie hidden, and typically repressed, within it. Such an enriched experience can then be re-directed back to daily life in order to transform it.”
(Gardiner, 2006: 207)
In line with the Marxian dictum in the Theses on Feuerbach, the goal is to elevate lived experience to the status of a critical concept, not simply in order to describe it, but in order to change it (Kaplan and Ross, 1987: 1). The French understanding of the everyday, Schilling (2003: 24) comments, incorporates the avant-garde injunction to ‘change life’ which runs through the left-wing politics of Lefebvre, the disruptive interventions of the Situationist International and the popular tactics of resistance articulated by De Certeau and which was adapted by the Surrealists from Rimbaud and Marx.
Everyday life undoubtedly does display routinised, static and unreflexive characteristics, as Schütz and other sociologists have noted. Nevertheless, the work of Lefebvre and others leads to the recognition that everyday life is also capable of surprising dynamism, penetrating insight and unbridled creativity. Everyday lives and knowledges demonstrate an irreducibly imaginative and dynamic quality. They cannot simply be written off as trivial, inconsequential and habit-bound (Gardiner, 2006: 207). In this sense, the French-derived thinking about the everyday differs from German-language reflections on Alltaglichkeit, such as in Lukacs’ Metaphysics of Tragedy and Heidegger’s Being and Time, which characterise the everyday as the domain of inauthenticity, tiriviality and error (Schilling, 2003: 24).
Michael Sheringham (2006: 3) emphasises the importance of French thought in the post-World War Two period (post-1945) in bringing the notion of the everyday, or the quotidien, to prominence. He argues that from the mid-1950s onwards a cluster of closely-related ways of thinking about and exploring the everyday developed which led to the notion of the everyday being positioned at the centre of French culture from the 1980s onwards, and into the 21st century. Since the 1980s, investigations and explorations of the everyday have become prominent in France certainly, but also elsewhere.
Prominent amongst those paying attention to the everyday in the French context are Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau and Georges Perec, in dialogue with such thinkers as Edgar Morin, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and those included under the banner of Situationism. In turn, these writers draw common inspiration from ideas about the everyday at large in the writings of Karl Marx, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau and Walter Benjamin, as well as the Surrealists (Sheringham, 2006: 4).
Thus, the work of critical neo-Marxist writers, such as Guy Debord, Henri Lefebrvre, the early Jean Baudrillard and Edgar Morin, articulating a ‘critique of everyday-life’, formed a unique contribution to the construction of a sociology of the quotidian, which examined everyday life as a site of capitalist domination characterised by ‘alienation’, ‘reification’ and ‘commodity fetishism’, or what Debord called the ‘society of the spectacle’ (Evans, 1997:223).
For Marx, the everyday is the site of political struggle, towards which philosophy should direct its attention; and is also the object of critique in certain forms of literary studies, as noted by Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (2002: 30):
“In Marx’s text philosophy must thus displace itself into the everyday struggle. In my argument, literature, insofar as it is in the service of the emergence of the critical, must also displace itself thus.”
(Spivak, 2002: 30)
In being conceptualised as a site of struggle within an agonistic framework, the everyday can be understood narratively as exhibiting dramatic tensions that take place in specific environments for specific kinds of actants. Therefore thinking about the everyday is of interest for design practices, particularly the design of narrative environments.
Brooker (2003: 96-97) suggests that references to everyday life can be taken to express an emphasis upon the forms and meanings of a common or popular culture. The assumption behind this position is that, as Raymond Williams argues, culture is ordinary, rather than the exclusive province of an elite. In turn, this underlies a broadly political perspective on cultural production and consumption, enabling the routine or banal in daily life to be recognised as a complex field of contested cultural meanings.
If, as Maurice Blanchot (1987: 13) suggests, the everyday constitutes, “a utopia, and an Idea, without which one would not know how to get at either the hidden present, or the discoverable future of manifest beings”, then the task of the designer is to become a critical theorist of everyday life, although not perhaps a practitioner of a utopian humanism.
Such a practice celebrates the intrinsic, although often invisible, promises and possibilities of ordinary human beings and the inherent value of common sense forms of making sense and knowing. It also recognises, nonetheless, the shortcomings of the mundane world as currently constituted. It is therefore attuned to the transgressive, sensual and incandescent qualities of everyday existence, whereby the whole fabric of daily life, in its sociality, materiality, spatiality and temporality, can take on a festive character, akin to that of a work of art (Gardiner, 2006: 207).
Resources
Good places to start researching how the study of everyday has developed are:
Blanchot, M. (1987) Everyday speech. Yale French Studies, 73, 12–20.
Blauvelt, A. (2003) Strangely familiar: design and everyday life, in Blauvelt, A. (ed.) Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, pp. 14–37.
Brooker, P. (2003) A Glossary of Cultural Theory, 2nd ed. London, UK: Arnold.
Evans, D. (1997) Michel Maffesoli’s sociology of modernity and postmodernity: an introduction and critical assessment. Sociological Review, 45 (2), 220–243. Available from http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/1467-954X.00062 [Accessed 7 May 2016].
Heller, A. (1985) The Power of Shame: A Rational Perspective. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hunt, J. (2003) Just re-do it: Tactical formlessness and everyday consumption, in Blauvelt, A. (ed.) Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, pp. 56–71.
Johnstone, S., ed. (2008) The Everyday. London: Whitechapel Gallery
Lefebvre, H. (1995) Critique of everyday life. Volume 1: Introduction. London, UK: Verso.
Lefebvre, H. (2014) Critique of everyday life. Volume III: From modernity to modernism (towards a metaphilosophy of daily life). In: Critique of everyday life. The one-volume edition. London, UK: Verso.
Martin, A. (2023) A Life full of laughter. Observer, 15 October, New Review, 43.
Perec, G. (2008) Species of spaces and other pieces. London, UK: Penguin Books.
Sandywell, B. (2004) The Myth of everyday life: toward a heterology of the ordinary. Cultural Studies, 18 (2), 160–180.
Schilling, D. (2003) Everyday life and the challenge to history in postwar France: Braudel, Lefebvre, Certeau. Diacritics, 33 (1), 23–40. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805822 [Accessed 7 May 2016].
Sheringham, M. (2006) Everyday life: theories and practices from Surrealism to the present. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
In the early 15th century, ficcioun meant that which is invented or imagined in the mind. The word derived from the Old French ficcion, which meant dissimulation, ruse; or invention and fabrication in the 13th century. This, in turn derived directly from the Latin fictionem, meaning a fashioning or feigning. This is a noun of action from the past participle stem of fingere to shape, form, devise, feign. The original sense was to knead and form out of clay.
The use of the term fiction to mean non-dramatic prose works of the imagination began in the 1590s. At first, this category often including plays and poems. The narrower sense of the part of literature comprising novels and short stories based on imagined scenes or characters was in use by early 19th century. The legal sense, i.e. fiction of law, arose in the 1580s. The related Latin words included the literal notion of worked by hand, as well as the figurative senses of invented in the mind; artificial, not natural. The Latin term fictilis means made of clay or earthen; while the term fictor means molder or sculptor but was also used of Ulysses as master of deceit. A fictum is a deception, falsehood, in short, a fiction.
If to fiction, Sara Ahmed conjectures, is to give shape and form, then fiction could be understood as giving character, whether or not that character is given an individual form.
Reference
Ahmed, S. (2011). Willful parts: problem characters or the problem of character. New Literary History, 42 (2), 231–253. Available from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/448716/pdf [Accessed 7 December 2016].
“It is said that the reader of an American magazine was so disturbed by an article on the subject of smoking and cancer that he decided to give up reading.” (Anecdote cited by Tim Harford, 2025)
In the French tradition, Eleanor Kaufman (2007) points out, the synthesis of Marx and Freud reached a heightened pace between the years of 1968 and 1974, above all in the work of Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lacan and Pierre Klossowski. The two most significant texts from this period are often thought to be Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974).
Although Alain Badiou’s early work is deeply critical of French theories of libidinal economy that sought to synthesize Marx and Freud in the wake of May 1968, Kaufman (2007) argues that there is in fact a startlingly lucid nexus of arguments in these writings that can be summarised according to three broad thematics or chiasms: exchange value and use value; human desire and inhuman desire; temporal movement and atemporal inertia.
Exchange Value and Use Value
The first thematic is the rethinking of the hierarchy of exchange value over use value, with emphasis on the desire structure proper to use value
Exchange value would seem to be something more abstract and more imbued with the complexity of money while use value would seem to refer to a presumably immutable quality of the object or thing in itself. This is particularly important for thinking about ‘designs’ of whatever complexity, from object to system, since one presumption has been that a primary focus of design is utility. Perhaps, or especially, even the notion of affordance remains tinged with utilitarianism.
However, as Jean Baudrillard (1981) writes in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, use value and indeed utility itself is a fetishised social relation, just like the abstract equivalence of commodities.
Thus, following Klossowski, Lyotard (1993: 82) proposes that both use and exchange value should be seen “as signs of intensity, as libidinal values (which are neither useful nor exchangeable), as pulsations of desire, as moments of Eros and death.”
Human and Inhuman Desire
The second thematic is that of a perverse, inhuman or machinic desire that transfuses the human being and transforms a relation of pure exploitation or revolt into something else. In this thematic, the boundaries of the human are explored through the death drive. The importance of this is to recognise that there is a logic of desire, often masochistic, that infuses all submission, and non-submission, to conditions of exploitation.
By way of example, Baudrillard (1981: 204) cites the following incident: “A group occupied and neutralized [a US Department] store by surprise, and then invited the crowd by loudspeaker to help themselves. A symbolic action! And the result? Nobody could figure out what to take – or else they took insignificant items they could easily have filched on any normal shopping day.”
Baudrillard’s point is that any attempt to liberate pure use value fails because use is always bound up in a logic of desire that is more rooted in the “desire of the code” than in the specificity of the object itself.
Lyotard’s (1981: 111) example focuses on the English proletariat, “at what capital, that is to say their labour, has done to their body. You will tell me, however, that it was that or die. But it is always that or die, this is the law of libidinal economy, no, not the law: this is its provisional, very provisional, definition in the form of the cry, of intensities of desire; … perhaps you believe that “that or die” is an alternative?! … Death is not an alternative to it, it is a part of it, it attests to the fact that there is jouissance in it. The English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening.”
The basic insistence that capital conditions and thrives on the very desires that would seem to be at odds with it, and that one cannot think situations of oppression or hegemony without taking these desires into account is a lesson of Lyotard’s libidinal economy, Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave, Gramsci’s model of hegemony and Fanon’s analysis of colonialism.
The theorists of libidinal economy argue that not to consider economy through the lens of desire, disjuncture and perversion is to fail to understand it. In short, one must attend to the desires that undergird use value and hence capital.
A corollary of attending to the desires that undergird use value and capital is that one must similarly be attuned to desires in the very form and genre of Marxian analysis itself, in short, as Lyotard (1993: 95-154) puts it, “The desire named Marx?”
Lyotard argues that there are at least two Marxes: one who is a severe critic of capital (the Big Bearded Prosecutor Marx) yet unable to dispense with his fascination for it; and the other who is caught in a juvenile state of enrapture with capital (the Little Girl Marx) yet rejects its “prostitution under the name of alienated mediation” Lyotard, 1993: 136).
In this extreme if not obscene fashion, Lyotard raises the important question of the desiring-relation to capital of those who critique it.
What Badiou denounces as a ‘false window’ is precisely the point of entrance that the libidinal economy theorists would take, highlighting above all Lacan’s ‘involuntary’ theory of the party and the Marxists’ ‘unenlightened’ theory of desire.
The point of the libidinal economy analysis is to retain two poles of the equation, such as use value and exchange value, and to observe how the two exchange positions in chiasmic fashion: use takes on the affective currency of exchange, while exchange has a utilitarian dimension.
Badiou’s work from the 1980s and his more recent meditations on Marxism and psychoanalysis represent an extreme departure from the work of the libidinal economy theorists. Badiou maintains the significance of such terms as the party, the workers, the masses, and the subject. By contrast, thinkers such as Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard and Klossowski are more decisively bent on an overt undermining of these terms. Hence, they are determined to show that precisely where you think there is practice, there is theory; where you think there is the material, there is the ideal; and above all, where you think there is a body, there is also language in a chiasmic and dialectical relation to that body.
If the libidinal economists seek to foreground the desiring mechanisms that underlie not only capital but their very attempt to write it, Badiou eschews such self-reflexivity.
Novelty-Movement and Radical Inertia
The third thematic is a thought of radical inertia. Badiou’s work is squarely at odds with the project of libidinal economy on multiple counts. Nevertheless, in different ways, both Badiou and the libidinal economy theorists come up against something that might be described as an atemporal force of inertia.
In libidinal economy theory there is clearly a premium on unstoppable libidinal flux and energetic machines. Even so, this thought also pushes towards its opposite: inertia. This can be witnessed in evocations of immobility at the end of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and in Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘body without organs’ coming up against the plane of consistency. At these points, there is an elusive yet radical inertia that rests at the limit point of such analyses, one that is not unlike Freud’s death drive. For Kaufman, it is the power of this radical inertia that is the greatest insight of the strain of thought that counts as the theory of the libidinal economic.
It would seem that Marxian thought and psychoanalytic thought are poised to discern in the problem of the new and mobile the simultaneous presence of the old and the immobile. Thinking the joint relation of inertia and stasis beyond simple mobility is, for Eleanor Kaufman, a central concern for our time.
Reference
Baudrillard, J. (1981) For a critique of the political economy of the sign. Translated by C. Levin. Candor, NY: Telos Press.
Harford, T. (2025) The resistant reader. Financial Times, 21 June, Weekend Magazine pp. 7-8
Kaufman, E. (2007) The Desire Called Mao: Badiou and the Legacy of Libidinal Economy, Postmodern Culture, 18(1), pp. 1–31.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1993) Libidinal economy. Translated by I. H. Grant. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Plato and Aristotle define literary and dramatic genres in terms of the form of enunciation. They distinguish between diegesis, reported speech which articulates the writer’s authorial voice, and mimesis, in which the writer speaks, as if directly, through the characters.
This sense of diegesis differs from that developed by Etienne Souriau and Gerard Genette, who gradually rework its meaning entirely so that it comes to refer to the world of the story in its entirety.
References
Genette, G (1980) Voice, in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980, pp.212-262.
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