Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 141

outbreak of hostilities he predicted that the War would not take
place. Afterwards he proclaimed that, indeed it had not done so.
This was, not unexpectedly, seized upon by some as an example of
the poverty and bankruptcy of Baudrillard's world. 22
A more positive view of the possibilities of digital technology can
be found in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Deleuze
was a philosopher, whose early work had consisted of a number
of elegant studies in the history of philosophy, which though con-
ventional enough in their form, concentrated on the work of those
outside of the mainstream, including Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume,
Nietzsche and Bergson. Guattari was a psychoanalyst and life-
long political radical, who had been a member first of the French
Communist Party, then of the Opposition de Gauche , a non-party
far-left organization. Since the s he had worked in the Clinique

de la Borde, a well-known centre of what would be known in the
UK as anti-psychiatry, which questioned the structures and func-
tions of traditional psychiatric institutions and attempted to
institute more humane and less hierarchical arrangements. Guattari
had also undergone psychoanalytical training with Jacques Lacan,
and had, in

1950

1969 , joined Lacan's Ecole Freudienne de Paris as an

analyst member.
The events of brought Deleuze and Guattari together. They

shared an interest in the failure of the revolution to take place, and
the subsequent return to the status quo ante of a repressive social
order. In particular they were concerned with what they perceived
as people's desire for their own repression. To analyse this they wrote
the first of their four collaborative works, L'anti-oedipe: capitalisme
et schizophrenie . 23 This dense and often difficult work combined
Marx, Freud, Nietszche and Lacan, among others, in an astonish-
ing analysis of the relationship between desire and capitalism.
Mille plateaux , the second part of Capitalisme et schizophrenie , 24
was published in

1968

. This extended and expanded upon many of
the ideas in the first part, as well as extending the range of their

1980