One of my favorite essays in the collection Chaosophy, which contains a selection of Félix Guattari’s shorter writings published in the 1970’s, is “Cinema of Desire”. What’s really cool about this essay is that it not only paints an interesting picture of cinema at the time, but it accurately predicts developments in labor, social interaction and even our perception of reality with the onset of the internet. Even though it was written almost 50 years ago, its an incredibly valuable analysis of media.

According to the bibliography provided, this piece was first given at a conference in Italy in 1973, and was later published in the original French edition of Molecular Revolution - La Revolution moliculaire. But what could a “cinema of desire” really mean? It’s kind of a confusing term. Why would we want to understand how cinema interacts with desire? Isn’t it more important that cinema and the distribution of sensory-audio-visual media, like movies, video games, animation and even YouTube videos like this one can have the freedom to express whatever they want?

To answer these questions, both in the context of the original delivery of this piece, and how they continue to apply in the modern world, we have to ask ourselves a fundamental question - What does cinema… do?

What Does Cinema Do?

To answer this question, Guattari first starts by analyzing the history of cinema - not just the movies, but a more general sense of the term “cinema”, where images are animated and manipulated to create a flowing system of representations. As one example, he mentions Plato’s Cave. Plato’s Cave is an allegory for having access to information about the “real” world. People deep in the cave look at shadows projected on the walls, believing they are interacting with the real world. However, these shadows are created by another group of people, puppeteering them in such a way to make the people watching believe a narrative - very similar to the suspension of disbelief that people experience when watching a movie. And similar to a movie, it is when you leave the theater or the chair - or the cave - that makes you reach out into the real world.

Similarly, Guattari points out that this history of cinema would also include religious imagery created by the Catholic Church produced across thousands of years, manufacturing not just the signs of God but also organizing the production of society and suppressing challenging sects or cults. He emphasizes how some of the schools emerging from this kind of cinema tried to deploy new kinds of thought, such as those relating to how we have personal, professional or sexual relations. For example, chivalry produces a new relationship with duty and love that is produced by a specific arrangement of signifiers. Likewise, he points out that psychoanalysis too arranges itself into what he calls “the little cinema of transference, Oedipus and castration.”

What is important to understand here about how Guattari conceives these different kinds of cinema, is that they are all different ways to control and contextualize desire. The way that Guattari talks about desire can be kind of hard to conceptualize without a strong understanding of psychoanalysis, but in this context, I can provide a good analogy.

Let’s look at something like a video game. When you play a video game, there is a wide range of possible states that can occur within the game, regardless of if it is something as simple as Pong or as complicated as those modern games I can’t stare at for more than 5 seconds without getting sick. How does a game reach a certain state? If we think of a video game as a series of logic gates - which is how all games are ultimately built - we can see that there are many different paths potentially that we could take, and sometimes this is even intentionally introduced into game design. In this context, “desire” is the force that ultimately “decides” which path is taken.

To make better sense of this, let’s think about playing Pokemon Red or Blue Version. What makes you decide what Pokemon you start the game with? When you first play the game, your decision is pretty much arbitrary because you don’t know anything about how the game works, and so you decide the Pokemon based on its appearance, sound or description, and whatever sounds most appealing to you. But as you get more experienced at the game, the choice may represent something else - you may pick Bulbasaur, knowing that it has the most type advantages in the gym, or you may decide Charmander, looking for a challenge. Or, you may pick the one you picked when you were a kid, to reminisce on the choice you made years ago - all of these are different paths that desire can take, and we can see how all these different reasons have different structures that explain why desire took that path.

For example, when we know that Bulbasaur has the most type advantages, the path of desire follows the idea that the game will be easier because of how Bulbasaur interacts in battles, how it learns moves and how its type combination interacts with those throughout the game. Not only does it depend on the structure of the mechanics, but it also depends on how the mechanics are organized. The Pokemon games are well known for having many Water types, which Bulbasaur has a type advantage against. All of these come together to make you “desire” to pick Bulbasaur - simply because it is the best choice when you arrange the structure that way. In this way, we can think of desire as flowing through a set of possibilities, based on how they are weighted. Desire, like water, will follow the path of least resistance, what makes the most sense, or what is often ultimately translated as Occam’s Razor - cutting the stuff not necessary for an explanation to make sense.

So how can one “control” desire? We can see that desire is controlled by the structure of the contexts that it flows through, similar to the literal logic gates of the software. But if desire can flow in any way and it just depends on the structure that it’s passing through to go towards one direction or another, then doesn’t that mean before desire passes through this structure, that it can go any which way? Absolutely! After all, any game placed in the game’s cartridge slot can produce an almost infinite set of possible arrangements of signifiers. In fact, this is how Guattari thinks desire works - it is a free flowing set of possibilities that, when contextualized around structure, is forced into particular manifestations. So what does that mean for all the possibilities not represented in this structure? For example, what if the coin in the coin flip game lands on its side somehow?

These possibilities are repressed. In psychoanalysis, repression is a defense mechanism that prevents some parts of desire from being manifested, because if it did, it would threaten the integrity of the structure of the ego, or the conscious self. That repressed psychological energy still goes somewhere, which psychoanalysts like Freud and Lacan thought expresses itself through the unconscious, such as with verbal slips of the tongue, or strange sexual desires. So, Guattari believes that in order to understand a history of desire, one also has to understand a history of repression, because repression is necessary in order to structure desire into specific organizations. This is what he believes cinema’s main function to be - to organize desire through structures of repression, created and mass produced through images. By mass producing these images that construct systems of representation and repression, machines can organize the desires of an entire society.

Dominant Realities and Power

So what are the consequences of mass producing these representations like a printer? Guattari believed that the production of representations through these cinemas is a function that is both a consequence and a means to maintain power in societies. Think about how in the example of Plato’s Cave, the people looking at the shadows are completely subject to what representations they produce. This controls their behavior, activity and actions, and most importantly, keeps them in the cave, continuing to watch the machine that produces the representations in the shadows. Guattari cites Oswald Cucrot, pointing out that language is not just a means of communication, but also a means to executing power.

But how can words have such strong power? Guattari didn’t think that the words themselves were what had power over material things. That would be kind of like if you said words, and then you could materialize anything - and obviously this is not how the real world works. Rather, he believed that the words were part of a larger machine that produced many other things that altogether produced a structure that directs flows of power. That is - it isn’t language that writes out the law, but rather law is what assembles the language. Instead of saying things and having them materialize into power, the speech is part of a larger system, with parts that are spoken and parts that have no signifying components, that work together to organize power.

So, since everything we understand is organized and arranged by these structures of power, where things like language are a result of its actions rather than the reason for it, this means that reality and pleasure can’t just be understood in a broad sense - because both our understanding of reality and pleasure are both structured by these organizations of power. Instead, Guattari states that we have to analyze what he calls “a principle of dominant reality” and a “principle of licit pleasure”. The dominant reality organizes everything we understand into a particular paradigm, and licit pleasure is what kinds of pleasure we are “allowed” to extract from that kind of reality. Desire is forced through these structures created between this dominant reality and licit pleasures through various authoritarian forced in our lives, ranging from schools, to the workplace, hospitals and, Guattari’s emphasis, “of course, the movies”.

Now remember what I said about how these structures repress desires so that it is “shoved” into the proper places? It’s through this intense repression that desire is forced into an obsession with the boundary between what is allowed and what is taboo. It keeps hyperfixating on things that disgust it, but it can’t look away, because it continues to extract pleasure from its boundaries, by identifying these new kinds of pleasures and subjecting it back into its dominant reality, in a manner similar to asceticism and other self-denialist practices - this way all these new experiences are submitted to the codes of the dominant reality. This is how Guattari believed what he called “Capitalist Eros” worked.

Oh great. Now he’s dropping another term. “Capitalist Eros”? It might help better to understand what “Eros” means in the context of psychoanalysis. See, according to Freudian theory, there are these things called “drives”, which can be thought of as a general tendency for desire to go in one direction or another. “Eros” is the life drive, which is associated with a desire for constructive activity - such as socialization or reproduction. Its counterpart is “Thanatos”, the death drive, which is associated with a desire for self destruction - such as risky behavior. Capitalist Eros then is Eros applied to the economy, a “libidinal economy” where we can analyze the transactions of desire within the context of capitalist mechanisms. Essentially, Guattari is explaining how capitalism desires to reproduce itself.

See, you can’t just make people go to work for you to build a massive society by just telling them to do so. Nobody’s going to do that willingly. So what do you do? You make them want to work for you.

Desire is always trying to escape this repression, so society needs to continue to adapt to capture these escapes through new, more detailed repressions. This means that in order for capitalism to reproduce itself, it needs to reproduce the capitalist subject in the heart of every person - to make each and every one of us the “ideal agent” so many capitalist economists speak of. To do this, capitalism reproduces models of organizing our desire, constructing relations to how we want to position ourselves in society, what we want to consume, and how we want to love. These models are launched into viral circulation through media. Guattari states - “[Capitalist Eros] launches these models the same way the automobile industry launches a new line of cars.” And the essential function being embedded in every subjectivity? In order to love something, you must own it - “The fundamental equation is Enjoyment = Possession”. This limits the way that people can express their desire through pleasure by conceptualizing it through the hierarchy produced by ownership, and a love for productivity for the sake of productivity.

Essentially, capitalism doesn’t want workers to think they’re workers - it wants workers to think they are little individualist bourgeoisie too. It wants them to think that every little interaction is a transaction to extract value in, to screw someone else over. Instead of valuing the work of a trade, such as one that may have been passed down generation by generation, laborers are “deterritorialized”, having their subject broken apart, so that they are “reterritorialized” into a new form - they become a commodity directed by their careers and the continuous development of technology on the automation of work. The relationship that workers have to labor adapts and evolves to adapt to the continuous leaks of desire by breaking apart the laborer into a multiplicity of new pressures directed by their relations to production and reproduction.

As a result, a lot of emphasis is placed on how subjectivity is shaped to various social relations, such as those to work, school, play and love. This way capitalism can produce subjectivities that direct and control the development of all facets of life. Specifically, Guattari emphasizes that capitalism migrates subjectivities that are grounded in material circumstances towards more abstract, artificial forms, which I suspect may be because of continuous increased alienation produced by this continuous deterritorialization between the modes of production and consumption.

Cinema Machines and Signifying Systems

This brings us back to the discussion of cinema. Remember how Guattari said that there were a bunch of different kinds of cinema? Well, all sorts of types of cinema, produced by different kinds of media and social interactions, like television, the movies, the press - and now video games and social media - act as physical machines that mass produce subjectivity through each and every consumer, collectively producing a dominant reality. Media isn’t just a means to communicate - they are instruments of power. This can be clearly seen in the current postmodern era, where the influence of repressive semiotic regimes, such as reactionary “meme culture”, mass micro-advertising campaigns with precision targeting and the propaganda embedded in video games and movies of the 2000’s and 2010’s on the internet influences the flows of modern politics - perhaps to too frightening of an extent. And because these machines direct the flows of power, they direct libido, or the directional flows of desire. Media and information influences what we want to be, and exist as a means to assert power - not just from the raw profits of mass media, but more importantly, through the production of the mass produced models of subjectivity.

Back when Guattari wrote this, and even now 50 years later in the postmodern era, media acts as a repressive force, embedding the “right” ways to enjoy pleasure. It normalizes certain ways of life and makes us collectively think “this is the way to live”. When its mass produced in big studios funded with millions of dollars, mass produced images really can’t afford to risk revolutionary imagery that would dismantle its own source of power. However, technologies were being introduced in the 1960’s that completely changed the situation. The Super-8 camera was a consumer grade video camera that could be used to film short movies. Typically used for home video, Guattari remarks that it has fantastic potential to portray political messages - instead of forcing a political message in a block of text, which may be hard to convey, it can convey ideas much more precisely and directly through non-linguistic relations displayed on the screen. Being produced on such small scales allows for micropolitical narratives to be produced and potentially become viral - something that grows even more possible with the era of social media. In the current day, cell phone footage has remarkably important political implications, such as when police brutality is captured on camera. To counteract this deterritorialized media, the state reacts by trying to suppress the recording of such incidents, whether legally or not, by the officers trying to force people to delete the evidence, to maintain media narratives. However, as with any repressive cop, there are still means of escape - when a cell phone camera is carefully propped to look like it is not conspicuously recording, as if one is playing a video game, it may not attract the attention of police officers who will otherwise request to delete it.

As a result, the way that we understand the real world is not etched in stone - it can be changed, and reality is not just a universality but is situated in a time, place and social awareness. This means, as Guattari puts it, “The order of the real has nothing to do with destiny; one can change it”. We are not beholden to one particular way of observing reality.

To demonstrate his point, he is interested in analyzing the structure of three signifying systems - systems that organize the order of the real. These are totalitarian systems, psychoanalysis and structuralism. These systems in particular are chosen because Guattari believes that they are sequential developments of each other, with each being a more deterritorialized form than the last.

What do I mean by this? Well, first, let’s look at totalitarian systems. These are systems where you have strict relationships with an authority figure, such as a God, the Church, or the state. What’s important here is that power is focused around a particular centralizing force. This creates a specific signifying regime that focuses around that specific figure, where all of reality converges around it like a giant black hole, and all desire must try to be captured within its structural boundaries.

However, Guattari believed that at the time of its writing, this isn’t how the libidinal economy of the world actually worked anymore - it had developed past this point. Instead, it worked around a more flexible network of signifying nodes, like what we see in psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis, these nodes are the Mother, the Father and the Child. The relationships between the three construct all possible relations through the development of the Oedipus Complex, which Freudian psychoanalysts believe produces a wide range of neuroses and sexual deviancy. Essentially, all relations are now reduced to the relationships between the self and the family.

The example that Guattari uses is the “Little Hans” case that Freud brings up. Little Hans was a little boy who was afraid of horses. His dad, who was a fan of Freud’s theories, discussed with Freud what could possibly be the issue. So uh, how do I explain this without being demonetized… Basically Freud concluded that the reason why Hans was scared of horses is because the horse represented Hans’ father. Why, you might ask? Well, because Hans secretly wanted to sleep with his mother, but he was afraid of being castrated by his father. As a result, he was scared of the horse because the horse has a huge penis just like his dad, and appears to have a “mustache” just like his dad. So, clearly, the solution was to make Hans have a big cock and sleep with his mother so that he can be just like Dad and resolve the Oedipus complex. Yes I’m serious I am not making this up I know it’s extremely weird.

Guattari, like many of you watching this, objects to this conclusion. He points out that the absurd conclusion is a result of trying to force the situation into the perspective of the Oedipus complex, which clearly favors the interpretation of the father, who was already biased towards Freud’s theories. What about the experience of the mother and the child? The mothers narratives are completely submitted to the father’s interpretation of the situation, a clear assertion of phallocratic power. And the child is assigned a narrative about wanting to sleep with his mother and kill his father, just to make sense of his fear of horses in the context of the Oedipus Complex. Guattari argues that it’s not something fundamental to the structure of psychoanalysis that creates the Oedipus Complex, but rather social and historical factors that leads to the production of the complex, and he emphasizes how it is produced this way to create an artificial consistency in the concept of the family within capitalism.

The screwed up thing is, because of the Oedipus Complex, our relationship with childhood is completely different than in more traditional societies. In the past, children were essentially free to do whatever until social initiation. However, the reinforcement of the Oedipus Complex socially means that children are being initiated at birth, with having every aspect of the child and mother’s development under close surveillance, through psychology, education and other social apparatuses. Everything about growing up is now under an analytic microscope.

The Oedipus Complex is pervasive, but Guattari points out that all the details are too static to really capture everything. So capitalism must keep going and continue to deterritorialize the model. This time, instead of having relations between static objects, the development is more towards an abstract relationship of signs, found in structuralist analysis, such as those seen in the work of Guattari’s former teacher, Jacques Lacan (whom I will admit I am still quite challenged by).

Now, some of you might be thinking, Lacan? That guy? Isn’t he the guy who said that the torus is like the neurotic or something? Well, yes, but no, but yes, but actually no… see, Lacan was complicated as a theorist, but the problem with his work, according to Guattari, wasn’t necessarily that he used mathematical terms wrong. In fact, it really doesn’t make much of a difference, because Guattari is more interested in the very concept of trying to represent the world through an abstract signifying regime. This approach to analysis broke apart the symbols in psychoanalysis even further to attempt to be complete abstractions that relate to each other based on completely artificial forms. Structuralism thought that it was creating a generic language to be able to analyze anything. But it really only psychoanalysis from the couch to the screen, in the form of film analysis.

He doesn’t discuss an in-depth criticism of structuralism here (he’s already written enough on that elsewhere!) but he does remind everyone of how natural codes cannot be reduced to these structuralist forms. As any geneticist will tell you, genetic code is definitely not like a language! In fact, natural codes also come embedded with parts that are not signified at all, which Guattari calls “asignifying” - such as visual-spatial relationships in art, auditory relations in music, speech and sound, and the complex logical relations expressed in mathematics, where relationships extend beyond abstract objects.

Another example he uses to critique this structuralism is that there are “presignifying semiologies”, such as pre-capital societies, and the subjectivity of insane people and children, who do not necessarily organize themselves around language-based relationship but can construct meaningful relationships through everything from their bodily movements to sound, gesture and dance. In comparison, capitalist expression is reduced into acceptable outputs expressed by dominant meanings. A psychotic person moving their body erratically is not seen as an expression of desire but as a threat to be suppressed by the police. Structuralist analysis pretends to be neutral in its analysis, but its very privileging of linguistic objects limits any ability to do so, by again subjecting all activity into a particular paradigm of relationships.

Asignifying Machines and Cinema

Currently, the machines of cinema are used to reinforce the current dominant reality of capitalism and a cult of possession. In this state, they aren’t capable of producing much outside of continuing to replicate the dominant reality. However, the power of cinema is not based merely on the fact that it is repeating this dominant reality, but really that the various aspects of the film - such as the framing, actors, camera lenses, and every other choice made in pre-production, production and post-production - all come together and produce special kinds of semiotic machines without having a language in particular at all. Instead of being like a language, its the barrage of sensory experiences produced by the particular arrangement of complex components interacting with each other that ultimately produces the experience of watching a film, and what kind of influence it is capable of producing in the viewer.

Cinema in particular, beyond just language by itself, has a unique ability to continuously evolve new forms of expression, which allows it to adapt to the continuous deterritorialization of pleasure in society as mentioned earlier. Capitalism is able to use these developments to capture and develop even further more refined and calculated cinematic machines to continue consumer engagement, such as the development of mass produced media in the 2010’s about various minorities. While the production of these films did give employment to minorities and secured them both useful roles on their resumes and access to higher classes in society, they exist ultimately to reinforce the dominant realities of capitalism, allowing only for the most minimally subversive critiques. For a particularly in depth example, Erudite Critic released an excellent video titled “Why Pixar’s Elemental Gets Racism Wrong”, where they explain how Elemental’s exploration of racism can never go beyond a surface level analysis, where the impact of colonialism and immigration are never truly analyzed in a material context. It’s not through the script of the film that produces these repeated constructs, but rather relationships between the characters, their designs, and the way that the art is designed to reinforce symbols seen in real life correlated with various racial themes.

To better understand what capacities are possible, Guattari cites the film critic Christian Metz, who states:

“The breadth of its semantic fabric is a consequence of two distinct causes whose effects are cumulative. On the one hand, cinema encompasses a code-lan­guage, in the talkies - whose presence itself would be enough to authorize semantic information of the most varied type. Second, other elements of the filmic text, for example, images, are themselves languages whose matter of content has no precise boundaries.” - Christian Metz

What’s important here to Guattari is that film can express content in all sorts of ways beyond just language, with specific examples he cites such as the tonal qualities of speech, instruments, music and melody, painting and scene construction, the highlights and shadows of black and white photography, and the movements and gestures of the human body. Guattari then turns to semiotician Umberto Eco, who pointed out that cinema could not be reduced to a system of double articulation, a binary split. See, cinema doesn’t produce meaning because of the intersection of two binary axes between syntax and grammar, and paradigms and representations. Rather, the complex semiotic relationships are produced secondarily by the processes that produces the film itself. To Guattari, the reason why silent films may feel like they can express a wide range of desire not because they are capable of less expression, but because their expression is not modeled into a structure of dominant significations yet. Think about how as both movies and video games gained more technological power, more fidelity in their graphics and special effects, that they were able to more cleanly and accurately produce the capitalist representations to produce its dominant reality - which may be why much of indie game and film deliberately tries to use alternative means of expression, especially reaching out to more primitive imagery and user interface design. Likewise, the mass distribution and molecularization of cinema in the form of television - a development rapidly accelerating in the time of this piece’s writing - subjected cinematic images to “the formula of commercial film”.

Here, Guattari makes an interesting point through all of this regarding the freedom of expression. To Guattari, the “freedom of speech” that libertarians advocate so heavily for is missing a big part of the equation. After all, just freely opening the gates means that one will continue to repeat the same repressions they were taught previously, merely deterritorialized and unconscious. Rather, he believes that what is more important is what redirection of flows of desire in the libidinal economy of cinema can produce. Look at an example like South Park - South Park became popular because of its raw obscenity and offensiveness, something that audiences have never seen before and desired for desperately. But is South Park’s commentary on society really truly subversive? In most cases, it appears to reinforce the liberal-centralist “we’re all stupid” mentality and resorts to falling back to the status quo. Very rarely does South Park actually make commentary that challenges its audience to produce new lines of thinking.

The development of the capitalist Eros and its influences on the libidinal economy, the bubbling new pleasures that form on the border of dominant representations and licit pleasure, is key to understanding the core problem Guattari is trying to get at. How this Eros creates new forms of pleasure to continue to capture all desire within its boundaries. It tries to codify all desire into abstract forms that can be controlled through binary flows. In this sense, desiring production can’t be separated from social production, because capitalism will try to convert free roaming desire back into its paradigms to extract free work into possible surplus value, repeating a politics that both re-encloses on itself, reinforcing the position of the self in relation to hierarchies, as well as repeating an attitude of acceptance of the status quo, that somehow these developments are “destined” and “natural”.

But desire, unlike Eros, is not structured by codes and laws. Remember - desire is like the state of the game before it is converted into all the structuralist paradigms that determine where the desire ends up. It exists before it’s cut and divided up by structures of sex, the family and society. It just wants to do what it wants to do, and desire comes first! All structures that are seemingly imposed by it are a product of desiring-production, similar to how when you start the video game, abstract structures in memory form representing different aspects of the game. Desire exists before love, psychology, language and even the laws of nature as we understand them. Guattari then points to children and psychotic people to demonstrate how desire can look without being heavily codified by society yet, the free association with any kind of love with any other kind of love, completely unbound by relationship between the sexes or family. Guattari states:

“It does not respect the ritual games of the war between the sexes: it is not sexual, it is transsexual.” - Félix Guattari

He doesn’t mean that all sex is transgender! Rather, he means something more broad - all love goes beyond the sexes! That love can be something that goes beyond cisheteronormative expectations like you may see in a Disney movie. Guattari continues:

“Nothing essential leads to the subjugation of the child, the woman, or the homosexual. In a word, it is not centered on dominant significations and values: it participates in open, asignifying semiotics, available for better or worse. Nothing depends here on destiny, but on collective arrangements in action.” - Félix Guattari

In conclusion, cinema has the power to repress desire, to reinforce the capitalist Eros and libidinal economy, or it has the power to potentially liberate it. This liberation goes beyond just allowing for the offensive - it is about a deliberate influence on the flows of desire through cinema, whether it be at the movies, or nowadays, in video games or on social media. There is no real structure that separates social and sexual themes, there is no politics without eroticism or the other way around. It is all interconnected. Cinema is always political, because whenever it produces and analyzes the figure of a man, woman, child, animal or any other kind of subject, it produces a set of relations that carry political implications with it - something particularly obvious in racist propaganda films such as Birth of a Nation. Repression in films is not about trying to suppress erotic or offensive imagery, but rather repressing images that challenge the status quo of the production of capitalist Eros.

Guattari wraps it all up with the following:

“In every production, in every sequence, in every frame, a choice is made between a conservative economy of desire and a revolutionary breakthrough. The more a film is conceived and produced according to the relations of production, or modeled on capitalist enterprise, the more chance there is of participating in the libidinal economy of the system. Yet no theory can furnish the keys to a correct orientation in this domain. One can make a film having life in a convent as its theme that puts the revolutionary libido in motion; one can make a film in defense of revolution that is fascist from the point of view of the economy of desire. In the last resort, what will be determinant in the political and aesthetic plane is not the words and the contents of ideas, but essentially asignifying messages that escape dominant semiologies.” - Félix Guattari

posted on 05:35:05 AM, 03/21/25 filed under: theory [top] [newer] | [older]